Whether you heeded the warning the first time around or indeed the second, US metallers Killer Refrigerator are back to stir us again to the threat of and war with lethal appliances through new album Refrigeration Plague. This time around the rebel rousing caution comes in an even more multi-textured and flavoured technical death thrash proposal which simply has you glancing over your shoulder at those electrical menaces lurking and waiting to strike.
Refrigeration Plague sees the alert incite and rabid creative antics of vocalist/guitarist Cody Coon (UnKured) once more linking up with bassist Countess “Lia” Blender and producer Luke “Java” Sackenheim from Bum-Ass Studios who also took care of mixing and mastering the Cincinnati outfit’s latest confrontation. The album follows 2014 debut full-length When Fridges Rule This World and the moment when arguably people really took notice, The Fridge and the Power it Holds EP of the following year. Confirming the suggestion Java made when sending over the album that Refrigeration Plague is a “tighter” proposition from the band than ever before, the release equally swiftly declares itself their most unpredictable and creatively psychotic without losing any intensity in its instinctive death/thrash breeding across fourteen ferocious encounters.
It opens up with Autoerotic Refrigeration and the dancing bass of Blender before things become far more frantic as Coon in guitar and voice vents his anxiety. Ravenously infectious and rapaciously nagging, the track is a minute and a half of fevered goodness setting up album and a greedy appetite for it with ease.
From there the listener is dragged into the darker heavier grime of Vacuum Doom (Rise of the Dirt Devil), every element as eagerly skittish in the first now revealing a slower, predatory side. Prowling with a sonic glint in its eye, the squealing guitar and vocal tones of Coon again entice; their trespass darkening as the track reveals the bolder tempest of its heart and technical menace of its presence. It ebbs and flows in intensity and creative mania before Night of the Living Bed slips in with its initial corrupted innocence surrounding the introductory tones of Adolf Green who subsequently sets the release ablaze with his sax. The track itself is a sweltering pyre of blackened death and thrash metal; the sonic niggle of the guitar a wiry web as loco as it is skilful; an insanity which eventually consumes the whole irresistible and increasingly psychotic encounter.
Dryers Eve follows with its own creative dementia; a technical delirium which invades and festers like a virus in the psyche. Again the senses enjoyably squirm under the threat of voice and guitar, instincts seduced by the roaming exploits of the bass whether the track saunters or launches itself at breakneck speed. As another threat is uncovered, Killer Refrigerator shows it has really grown in all aspects, next up C.H.U.D. confirming the fact with its virulent asylum of sound and craft. As most around it, it is a slither of a track but one more active and compelling than most multi-minute offerings.
The excellent funky antics of The Revenge of Frankenstove has hips and imagination swinging next, its cross-over mania a sinister and beguiling aberration while De Maytagus Dom Samsungus is a murky yet still contagious consumption of the senses. Both tracks have body and thoughts trapped and elated with their individual enmities, the first especially addictive before the visceral stomp of Gas Station Strangulation eclipses both; bloodlust in its nostrils and sinful misdoings in its soul.
A Salad Named Elizabeth follows with the guest introduction of Kitty [Pryde]; her flirtatiously unaware of danger tones the prelude to another kitchen nightmare of demonic proportions. Its rabidity in sound and intent is a tsunami of primal discontent and skilful manipulation which fascinates and ravishes the senses. Whether its death bred body quite lives up to the excellent opening is debateable but across four plus minutes, the song has attention and pleasure engrossed, a success Spaghetti and Meatballs similarly achieves with its evil rascality.
The excellently titled It’s Not Over Toilet’s Over springs its technical helter-skelter straight after, infesting ears with sonic and rhythmic paranoia while the murderous trial of Splatterfarm is rose coloured pleasure chewing on the senses.
Refrigeration Plague finishes off with firstly its title track, a malevolent infestation of sound and enterprise becoming more violently catchy by the minute and lastly Beyond Frigid Horizons, a kaleidoscopic fury of metal which almost does not know when to depart and is all the more fun for it.
Killer Refrigerator is not a band for everyone, especially if a sense of humour is left at home, but musically is one of the most enjoyably imaginative and voraciously bold extreme metal propositions out there. So be brave and dive into Refrigeration Plague you have nothing to lose and everything to gain as all those appliances leer at you waiting.
Refrigeration Plague is available now @ https://bumass.bandcamp.com/album/refrigeration-plague
https://www.facebook.com/KillerFridge/
Pete RingMaster 15/08/2017
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