Kill - Death KILL Metal

KILL - Death KILL Metal (GRUFT - CD 2010)

Kill is one of the newer Polish death metal bands, although it is formed by several experienced musicians, who have previously been playing in few quite well known bands like Christ Agony, Supreme Lord, Witchmaster, Sacrilegium. Personally I’ve heard of Kill for the first time only recently, when they announced and later on released their debut full length CD “Murder Rips Its Path”. I’ve got this album and I must admit that it really crushed me badly. I can still feel a neck ache and pain in the guts, as this material really kicked me hard and definitely was one of the best death metal releases of 2012, in my opinion. And because I always like to have complete discographies of bands I like in my collection, I decided to look around for some of the earlier Kill releases. “Kill” promo from 2009 is not available anywhere, but I was lucky to find the first official release of the band – “Death KILL Metal” EP, which was released in 2010 by a small and very underground, but doing a good job label called Gruft Prodüktion. They’ve also released such materials as Bloodthirst / Excidium split CD, Bloody Sign / Mortificy / Luctiferu / Cromb 4 way split CD and Supreme Lord’s “Legion of Doom”, so few very good materials, that’s why I was quite certain about the high quality of the “Death KILL Metal”, speaking of how the booklet and everything will look like. Another thing was if the music will be as good as from “Murder Rips Its Path”. It would certainly be really cool, if it was…

I already gave about a dozen of spins of this CD and well, I must say one thing –I like “Murder Rips Its Path” more, but that doesn’t mean “Death KILL Metal” is worthless. Definitely this is also a very solid and good material, but maybe lacking a spark or something what would really put everything ablaze and cause some serious damage. Kill – just as on their debut full length album – performs a strictly US influenced death metal and when I listen to their music one band comes to my mind mainly – Cannibal Corpse. Of corpse one may also list here Suffocation, a bit of recent Deicide, Obituary, Six Feet Under and whatever, but it is the Buffalo Cannibals, who must have made the biggest impact on Kill. That can already be proved by the fact that this EP contains “Stripped, Raped and Strangled” cover. This track, one of the best Cannibal Corpse songs ever, from one of their better albums (“The Bleeding”) has been played very solidly, pretty much just as the original, without any changes or personal touch of Kill, what some of you may see as a disadvantage, but I don’t care. It definitely is a good cover tune.

As for Kill’s own material I must say that I like their mid paced or slow death metal a lot. It is very brutal, very heavy, definitely perfectly suiting the maniacal headbanging... Kill has plenty of very memorable and catchy riffs, as for this kind of music, and that may be one of the reasons, why their music is so easy to listen to and why it just force you to bang the skull. But just listen to such tracks as “Steel Garotte” for instance… That first riff from will stick to your head for the rest of the day, obviously it also is one of the most Cannibal Corpse’ish riffs from the whole EP. “Holy Inquisition”, “The Ordals” and “Peccatum” are another good songs – again I must say I like the riffing and all else, also the production is very nice; thick, heavy and perfect for this sort of music. I’m afraid though that near close of the EP, with two last songs – “Iron Face” and “Taste of Water” – Kill lost something, definitely these two tracks are way less interesting and I must say they’re just dull. The riffing became just average and so are the vocals and everything else in these two songs, so maybe it would be better if “Death KILL Metal” didn’t have them?

Final rate: 70/100