SKULL411

LAST ETERNAL BREATH, From a Tormented Soul (2011, demo)

The skull:
This one is a textbook example of a skull photo scanned from a textbook. It’s a photo taken without even the slightest artistry, but the skull is quite large, and if nothing else the 3/4-from-the-top profile is something we don’t see too often in the BDS compound. The chunks of what looks like concrete are the only fun detail here. I imagine that the former owner of this skull tried eating them, maybe while high on PCP, and puked them up in his last eternal barf. His final thought was, “Fuck. They’re totally going to figure out that I was eating cement. I’m gonna look so stupid.”

The music:
Busy, technical death metal not unlike Decrepit Birth or Obscura, although not as brutal as the former nor as exploratory as the latter, Last Eternal Breath are nevertheless a fairly good example of the form. This demo is not especially well-recorded, but it’s not horrible sounding either, and it’s a pleasant change of pace to hear music like this that hasn’t been sampled and quantized to death. This is very much the sound of a band who could only afford four days to record and mix, and rehearsed the shit out of their material in advance of their studio session. These days, “technical death metal” can mean a lot of things, and in most cases, it means I’m not gonna like it, but these guys fall in that narrow range that appeals to me, even if I can’t wholeheartedly endorse them. A little more time spent on songwriting and developing at least one original hook would help, but even if they just polish what they’ve got to a high sheen, they’ll be good enough to compete with all but the very best bands working this style in no time. And even at that, they’re already much better than most of the bands on Unique Leader.
— Friar Johnsen

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