Not content with making an unexpected return to the greatest death metal band of all time (Morbid Angel, in case you missed the memo), Steve Tucker is also keeping the extreme fires burning with his own band.
Not entirely surprisingly, Warfather play death metal with occasional shades of Tucker’s other musical outlet, but this is no straightforward or familiar affair. Instead, songs like Headless Men Can No Longer Speak exist somewhere between Krisiun’s blank-eyed pummelling and the swirling blasphemy of Vital Remains, with numerous mood and tempo shifts thrown in for maximum disorientation.
Amorphous opener Orders Of The Horde and the thrash-tinged, morbid sprawl of Carnage Of The Pious benefit hugely from sustained levels of sonic clarity and bite, but old-school spectres are omnipresent and make this one of 2016’s most essential releases for death metal aficionados of any generation. Meanwhile, Tucker himself has never sounded more imposing, which is great news for Morbid Angel fans.
