The Ghosts to Metal’s Past #1
The Ghosts to Metal’s Past #1
Through the Eyes of Sleeping Spirits
Fatality Album Review
By Boris Lee
In my recent album review covering the debut from Mister Misery, I mentioned what it is like being an aging headbanger and my re-introduction to music as a journalist. What it’s been like adjusting to the metal music of today’s generation versus the metal music from my youth. With some music being “New to me,” my opportunity to explore the “Tunage” of today and tomorrow, threw me into a historical headbang to find things perhaps we missed along the way. Thus the quarterly I am launching here, Hidden Horn Raisin’ Headbangers. These will be albums noteworthy to me, possibly that have not made it to your ears or deserving a fresh audience. For the inaugural article, I have chosen an album from a Pennsylvania based nineties metal group known as Fatality.
While I was not a fan of nineties-metal music at the time, it grew on my not long after the millennium moshed through the pits. I have always felt that the heavier tonality of what is nineties metal music was forged as another anti-establishment/musical state of the union message, similar to the birth of punk and thrash metal music. As bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam dominated the radio waves and commercial market, there was the smaller metal music market making sure the pit pounders still had a heartbeat to be heard through all the grunge garbage that polluted the nineties generation.
There is no doubt in my mind that nineties metal music holds roots in the previous generation’s music from the founding fathers like Venom, Slayer, Testament, and others of the like. Throw in the deep-demonic-guttural vocals most nineties metal bands frantically fashioned, and you have a new breed of brutality. Fatality fits right into that formula with other brutal beings such as Cannibal Corpse, Lamb of God, Sepultura, Carcass, Amon Amarth, and others.
Choose Your Eternity, opens with a death metal march macabre titled, Sleeping with the Corpses. The song brutally balances tempo changes with guttural style vocals. The rhythm section of the band sets the smash face pulse to the song, which sets the pit pounding pace for nearly the entire album.
“Crucified,” continues the cacophony of crushing creativity while “Macarbra” and “Creator,” are haunting pieces reminiscent of early Black Sabbath instrumentals. “Written in Black,” is arguably the centerpiece of metal magnificence offered by Fatality. “Spirits,” closes the album with a folk fashioned fright.
Fatality’s Choose Your Eternity is a nineties metal masterpiece worth the nostalgic nod. You can check out the album on YouTube by following the link below.
