Plague Widow - Plague Widow EP

Plague Widow are a brand new band out of Sacramento, California, playing a particularly brutal and dark style of deathgrind. Their first EP is self-titled and I have to say well titled, as the first thing I noticed about Plague Widow was their awesome name. Plague Widow runs for fifteen minutes, comprising of nine songs. It is fast and technical, loaded with morbidly frantic unconventional death metal riffs which bring to mind the likes of Gorguts, Portal and even Cryptopsy. With these bands as influences it should be clear that PW’s approach is no thoughtless bombardment, but a carefully coiled whip unleashed with competency and intelligence. Of these fifteen short minutes, five belong to the intro and outro and are nothing but bleak, minimal noise buildups. Also there are two tracks interspersed between the metal both named “Abyss”, which provide some very creepy speech samples. These run for about another minute or so. The samples are well chosen and effective, but all together this brings the actual metal time down to a mere nine minutes. Now, a lot of the time I might say that the ambient intro/outro thing is boring these days, but I feel they work well on this EP because they seems to compress and condense the short but sharp intensity of the vicious deathgrind between them. The last two tracks before the outro are definitely the highlight here, featuring demented death metal breakdowns and black metal blasting. At first I thought the band were nothing really too special, and to be truthful it’s sometimes difficult for me to appreciate death metal these days because of the steadfast repetition it is usually confined to, but after giving PW a few shots I discovered a very effective little record with a bit more than just a callous exterior.

In short: Hear ye! Hear ye all lovers of death metal: Plague Widow is here.

Standout tracks: “Assimilated Subconscious”, “Operating the Segmental Apparatus”

Score: 8.0