This is the third album by Crown Magnetar, a US death metal/deathcore band.
Crown Crown Magnetar’s brand of deathcore is on the more extreme side of the spectrum. The Hollowing of Godflesh delivers a heavy dose of brutal punishment across 29 unforgiving minutes.
Calling this deathcore is misleading in some ways, as The Hollowing of Godflesh is far nastier and more ferocious than most bands that get that genre tag applied to them manage to be. Having said that, it’s still definitely of the style. There are a multitude of colossal breakdowns to choose from, as you may expect. Here though they are welded to a formidable death metal chassis. It’s like deathcore, only better.
The Hollowing of Godflesh takes from brutal death metal, deeply infuses it with deathcore dynamics, and forces the result into the listener’s face wrapped up in barbed wire and broken glass. Crown Magnetar shred the spot hard.
The band’s relentless vision for extremity is driven forward by powerful heaviness and fierce aggression. This is a beast of an album that brings the riffs for more and to greater effect than it has any right to. The Hollowing of Godflesh will make you move whether you want ant to or not. In places the band lace their songs with murderous tension. In others it is edged with technical capabilities that sharpen the music’s carnage. As befits the style best, the songs are short and nasty. They waste no time, dealing their damage and then making way for the next bruising track to arrive and do the same.
Crown Magnetar aren’t reinventing the wheel with their brutal deathcore, The Hollowing of Godflesh is simply a superior example of the style.
For fans of bands such as Beneath the Massacre, Decapitated, Dying Fetus, and Thy Art Is Murder, this is an essential listen.
