Deathgrave |Hell Is Evil |Tankcrimes

"Hell Is Evil" is the third full length from the band, released through Tankcrimes with art by Max Rain, and it runs a little over half an hour across ten tracks. Wilkinson mixed and mastered it at his own Earhammer Studio. The mix puts the low end and the guitars in the same lane, so the doom and industrial drag of "Smaller And Smaller" never smears the grind bursts around it. The songwriting piles death, thrash, punk, industrial, doom, noise rock and d beat onto a grind spine, and the switches happen inside the tracks, so each one plays like a short collision. Zane moves from blasts to d beat stomps without stumbling, Alberts' bass grinds under the riffs, Cornejo roars over the top, and Chris Reifert adds a second growl on "Hard To Swallow".

Lyrically the album sits in a bleak, godless place, from "Your Pain Is Ready" to "Won't See You In Heaven". "Born From Death" aims that bleakness at something real, the case of a brain dead woman kept on life support to incubate a pregnancy under Georgia's restrictive abortion law. The genre blend gives the band a sound of its own from the first riff. The track lengths, under a minute and a half for "Your Pain Is Ready" and past four minutes for "Won't See You In Heaven", change the pace often enough to hold the running order together. "Won't See You In Heaven" runs out of riff before its four minutes end.

|7.5