Nightfly
Got to admit I don’t have a lot of Australian death metal in my record collection. A bit of Portal and er… well that’s about it really though there’s been some Be’Lakor kicking around on my wants list for ages that I’ve not got round to buying yet. I recently came across Final Man, the debut album from Melbourne based Contaminated. Like fellow Aussies Portal these guys clearly don’t want to give you an easy listen though they don’t plumb to the depths of hell that Portal take you too.
Instead they opt for a raw old school sound though infused with a Lovecraftian sense of dread. The guitars have that Swedish sound pioneered by the likes of Entombed and Dismember though if anything things get even dirtier here. Musically this is pretty good stuff, not ground-breaking by any means, but the nine tracks over a shortish thirty four minutes are dense and loose with a decent collection of riffs. This is dark and heavy stuff! It’s actually the songs that incorporate slower sections like Their Future that works best for me, which somehow manages to convey that sense of impending doom that’s not in short supply here more effectively.
I’ve never been much of a fan of that low guttural unintelligible grunt style of death metal vocals and that’s what we get here. Despite this minor setback the thick and organic production is perfect for this kind of music and each band member acquits himself well though we’re not talking complex - an extremely heavy and dense atmospheric sound taking precedence which is no bad thing.
I quite enjoyed my time listening to Final Man, the only problem being that with so much great new death I’ve come across this year there’s not enough here to draw me back in a hurry. Nevertheless, it’s early days for these guys yet and I’ll be keeping an eye out for future releases from them.