SEWER - DEATH MIASMA

Most death metal nowadays takes itself very seriously. No room for error or sloppiness. Just tuned to perfection death metal. Sewer takes a big middle finger to that and does whatever they want. This is the second EP that Sewer has released and just by looking at the artwork, I'm really intrigued.

To be honest, I haven't listened to the previous EP from our Ohio boys. I wanted to go in without knowing anything about them. Maybe that was the best choice because I'm enjoying every second of 'Death Miasma'. From the first second on, you are being confronted with a buzzsaw-esque guitar tone which suits the whole sound that Sewer is creating. There are a lot of simpler elements in the style of old school death metal like the not overly difficult riffs and that is one of the reasons why Sewer is bringing the fun back into death metal.

During the second track on the EP 'Shotgun Massacre', the band surprises us with a humpa-style of grindcore, after the spoken intro from the legendary movie 'They Live', which goes back to fast paced death metal. The vocals do tend to go everywhere during 'Shotgun Massacre' but that is fine for a band like Sewer. 'Shotgun Massacre' does go through a lot of genre bending moments and from time to time, Sewer does sound like the Chicago death metal scene bands like the early days of Nucleus.

'Realm Of Decay' does sound a bit different. I can't find any information of this maybe being a demo recording or something but the drumsound does sound a lot different than the first two songs. The production is not like the other two so that might be distracting. Even though, the last track 'Realm Of Decay' is more focussed on the doomy death metal side of what Sewer is also trying to conjure.

The last track 'Back From The Dead' does have the same production as 'Death Miasma' and 'Shotgun Massacre'. Yes that production isn't 'like normal standards' but as I said, for me Sewer is about enjoying the music you want to put out and that is exactly what they've done. Not top notch production sound but straight to the bone how they wanted to sound on 'Death Miasma'.

Final words, this EP 'Death Miasma' is about just having fun and play catchy, mainly old school death metal, death metal with hints of grindcore/doom/thrash scattered throughout the whole EP. If you want to listen to fun and do-whatever-they-want death metal, go and listen to these guys in Sewer. An absolute blast to listen to and I hope that they will release something more asap because 4 songs isn't that much.