Drawn and Quartered

Return of the Black Death (Moribund Cult)
by Ari M. Joffe

Here’s a death metal band that kicks it old school, for better or worse. Drawn and Quartered have been around since the late ’90s, playing pretty standard death metal: Guttural vocals, heavy downstroked guitar riffs, machine gun fire drum beats, etc. It’s the sound that bands like Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, and Death had been doing for awhile before DAQ came on the scene, and it’s not like DAQ have brought anything new to the party.

It’s kinda refreshing, in some ways, considering that a lot of “new breed” metal bands wanna add elements of techno, classical, hip-hop, or whatever to the mix. On the other hand, if you’re gonna tread well-traveled terrain as DAQ has chosen to, at least do it with a cool stride. DAQ’s main problem is that one tune’s basically indistinguishable from the next. They all use the same structure (blastbeat to half-time breakdown back to blastbeat) and very similar riffs (lots of triplet patterns). Yeah, that’s kind of to be expected within this genre, but the real pros have a way of making it sound fresh and exciting. With DAQ, it’s just kinda “blah,” growled in the Satanic Cookie Monster voice. If you’re a major death metalhead, you’ll probably dig it alright, but if you’re not familiar with the genre, there are way better places to start.
(www.moriboundcult.com)