Still Underrated, Ten Albums Deep
Carnifex are one of the core bands of the deathcore resurgence, and they still get ignored. That has never sat right with me. These guys are truly great, and album ten is not where a coasting band ends up.
More Than Misery lands November 6 on Sumerian Records, the first record under the deal they signed back in May. Whitechapel guitarist Zach Householder produced it, straight off Hymns In Dissonance. Jeff Dunne mixed it. Entheos vocalist Chaney Crabb guests on “The Process Of Pain,” and “Roses & Rotting Corpses,” the single that announced the Sumerian signing, turns up at track six. The title track video, directed by Midvessel, is out now.
Here is what gets lost every time deathcore cycles back into fashion: the bands cashing in on a revival are usually the new ones, and the bands who never left rarely get named. Carnifex never left. They put out records through the genre’s boom, through the years when admitting you liked deathcore got you laughed out of the room, and now through its rehabilitation. Ten albums is not a victory lap. It is a body of work.
Handing production to Householder is the part worth paying attention to. Hymns In Dissonance is the heaviest thing Whitechapel has put out in years, and hiring the person responsible for it is not a maintenance move. Scott Ian Lewis calls the record “Carnifex at our most honest and unapologetically brutal,” which is the sort of thing every frontman says. The difference is that the personnel behind this one back it up.
California Dates
09/04 — Fresno, Fulton 55
09/05 — Santa Ana, The Observatory
09/06 — Roseville, Goldfield Trading Post
10/02 — San Diego, House Of Blues
10/03 — San Jose, The Ritz
They are opening All Shall Perish’s The Price Of Existence 20th anniversary tour with Extermination Dismemberment and Mauled, with a European co-headliner alongside Despised Icon and Suffocation to follow. Full routing at the band’s socials.
The Santa Ana show is next Saturday. Eight days. Definitely worth checking out.
Source: Sumerian Records