Album Review: Street Tombs - Existence is Corruption

This’ll be pretty quick.  Let’s not try to complicate this and make Street Tombs’ new album Existence Is Corruption something that it isn’t.

Have you ever enjoyed Goatwhore?  Or Venom?  Or Celtic Frost?  Or Darkthrone?  If you’re nodding your head vigorously (especially if your neck hurts while doing so,) you’ve come to the right place.

Listen, that might sound like an oversimplification, but really, Existence Is Corruption doesn’t need to be more than that.  There will always be a place in the crowded, gore-addled metal landscape for a band to remind us all of the days gone by in a fresh way, thumping out old-school death with a grimacing sneer and a bunch of stringy black hair and leather jackets.  It’s part of the collective musical DNA of the genre and appeals at the most primordial, instinctive level.

Especially when the artist crafting the tunes is so evidently good at it.  Street Tombs excels at knowing all the proper beats of how to write music in this vein, and the band is tight in their recitation.  It’s hard not to grin at the single “Deceptor,” which provides us with grim tones, yes, but also an accessible riff that’s easy to bop along to (as much as one can be said to ‘bop’ to music in this stripe.)  

Everywhere you turn, the record offers four-minute chunks of fun death metal, chugging along with broken-glass guitars and the usual growled missives about the futility of the human condition.  Real old-home-week kind of stuff, and that’s meant as a compliment. Best of all, unlike so many albums in this particular splinter, Existence is Corruption doesn’t sound like it was recorded in the back of a garbage truck.

(There is also, in all the guitar solos, just the barest hint of an East Bay Ray guitar tone, which sounds like it would be out of place, but works surprisingly well here.)

There is a…oneness…to the sound of the album.  Which is to say, in a blindfold test, it would be hard to identify one song from another, and the tone and pacing of the record never changes in a tangible fashion.  In a paradoxical way, that makes the record really fit for leaving on while doing office work (try it and see!) as it provides excellent, high-octane but not overbearing music to set your rhythm to.

As stated at the top though, don’t make this record something it doesn’t need to be.  Street Tombs knows what band they want to be.  They’ve recorded an(other) album that illustrates that point.  Relax and just enjoy the album for the simple joy of it.