Street Tombs |Existence Is Corruption |Carbonized Records

Street Tombs formed in 2017 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at The Cave, an underground venue where the band hosted shows for the local DIY punk and metal crowd. Three demos led to the debut full length "Reclusive Decay" in 2023, which took the number 38 spot on Decibel Magazine's list of the year's albums, and several US tours followed, one of them supporting Left To Die. In 2024 came "RIP The Abyss", a compilation of material cut during the first months of the pandemic, released as the band set out across the US and Canada with Necrot. The lineup is Damian Jacoby on vocals and guitar, David McMaster on guitar and backing vocals, Ben Brodsky on drums and Galen Baudhuin on bass, a crew that mixes death metal with D-Beat street punk.

"Existence Is Corruption" is the second full length, eight tracks and around thirty four minutes, which is all the D-Beat needs. Greg Wilkinson, a Grammy winning engineer, tracked, mixed and mastered it between Engine 70 Studios in Santa Fe and Earhammer Studio in Oakland, with Baudhuin adding extra tracking. One engineer on every stage shows. The guitars of Jacoby and McMaster move as one body, the bass stays under the riffs where it belongs, and Brodsky's kick and snare stay easy to follow in the D-Beat pulse of "Pestilent Storm". The riffs are crusty, blackened at the edges and death metal in spine.

"Deceptor" and "Upset The Grave" use four and a half to five minutes to turn those riffs over a few times, while "Pestilent Storm" and "Mental Mutilation" are over near the three minute mark. The playing is fast and sure, the result of years of shows in Santa Fe. Originality stays modest, because crust and death metal is a busy lane and the band does not leave it. The words go after modern society, complacency, corruption and destruction, and titles like "Septic Values", "Mental Mutilation" and "Parasitic Feast" show the angle: rot, disease and a world eaten from within.

It is angry, aims at one target and stays consistent with the speed. The tracks sit in a narrow range of three to five minutes and share one tempo and one sound, so the album plays as a single block from "Pestilent Storm" to "Parasitic Feast", though the few tempo shifts leave the four minute tracks in the middle running close together. A fast, crusty death metal album that does its job and leaves before it gets stale. Only the lack of new ideas and the narrow tempo range stop it from going higher.

|7.5