Leper Colony – Self Titled

By RingMaster Review on February 8, 2023 • ( 0 )

Since the start of our personal journey with music, being savaged and ravished, violated and pleasured has been an instinctive joy. It is a weakness which has led to the exploration of some of the finest persistent trespasses and releases over the years and now joining that copious list is the self-titled debut album from death metallers LEPER COLONY.

The German band has been described as a ‘supergroup’ and understandably so. It has risen from the creative union between vocalist Marc Grewe (ex-MORGOTH, INSIDIOUS DISEASE), guitarist/bassist Rogga Johansson (PAGANIZER, REVOLTING), and drummer Jon Skäre (CONSUMPTION, REEK); the trio looking to classic death metal inspirations for their sound and drawing references to the likes of DEATH, ASPHYX, PESTILENCE, SLAYER, MASSACRE, and CANCER. Equally though, they have embroiled those old school essences in their own fresh and inventive fertility of imagination and dexterity and as proven by their first release, what emerges is a sonically and emotionally embittered confrontation which whether voraciously surging through ears in a tide of ravenous riffs or twisting and turning with unpredictable deviancy, usually simultaneously, wormed under the skin in fascination and creative nagging.

From the moment album opening fury, The Human Paradox, stands toe to toe with the senses, there is no let-up in hostile enmity and creative ferocity. The song immediately burrowed deep in an eddy of groove strung riffs, calm rhythms tenderising the moment before uncaging their own inner spite. Quickly, the song drips into a menacing stroll, Grewe’s plaintive roar as intense and argumentative as the prowling sounds around him. New twists in attack and enterprise are continuingly sprung with the track proving addictively irresistible in character, trespass and craft.

Perdition’s End follows and instantly sets its own agenda of persuasion and harassment as again riffs tunnel and rhythms harry. As with its predecessor, that old school breeding aroused an instinctive appetite within but even more so the swiftly involved uniqueness of interpretation and engagement of those flavours and the band’s rich ingenuity enslaved.

With true individuality in their arsenal, each track within the release presents a new dilemma of addiction and dynamic of adventure, The Surgical Undeadvors next shaping its infernal tempest with mercurial severity and capricious imagination while Tar and Feathers offered its own unique insurgency and creative manoeuvring with thrash kilned urgency and melodic metal cunning. Both tracks are superb, the album continuing to intensify its prowess and invasive tempting, being quickly matched in success and voracity by the bestially stalking, groove writhing Rapture Addict.

Leper Colony, the track, is next up; a progressive rise courting new captivation as guitar and rhythms entangled in a web of tempting. Soon though, Grewe’s throat leads a dark uproar, an eddy of malediction bound in sonic wiring relishing the trio’s melodic and groove metal invention. As the song before and all to be fair, there is much more going on in idea and touch than our words hint at, the gloriously compelling and vicious A Flow So Greatly Macabre epitomising that with its hellacious kaleidoscope of sound within its death metal brewed tornado.

With Flesh Crawl Demise crushing the senses in an avalanche of spite and brutality and album closing Gruesome End unleashing its metal varied tumult, the release came to an irresistible end. Both tracks in their individual ways severely assaulted and violently seduced, each stoking the imagination with their nefarious endeavours and relentless molestation; each epitomising and increasingly inflaming the lustful pleasure found within LEPER COLONY’S stunning debut.

You will hear big and bold praise for the band and their full-length, and as we found out in swift time, both are all that and more.

LEPER COLONY’S album is out now via Transcending Obscurity Records; available digitally and on CD @ https://lepercolonydm.bandcamp.com/ and through https://transcendingobscurity.8merch.com/