Lord Mantis – “Death Mask” [Album Review]

One listen to the third album from Chicago “anti-lifers” Lord Mantis and you’ll be redefining your boundaries for what is classed as heavy music. Setting out their intentions right from the pounding, sludgy opening bars of “Body Choke,” Lord Mantis truly plunge heavy music into new depths of horrifying depravity.

Crushing sludge fights for airspace alongside hateful spits of fury as each track descends into a punishing sermon of heavy, hate-filled filth throughout an album which will push your very sanity to the limit. Clearly a test of endurance, if you survive the eight and a half minute aural raping that opener “Body Choke” gives you, you won’t be given a chance to sit back and pat yourself on the back before Lord Mantis take you into even an darker, more horrifying world. It’s a world that you’ll have wish you never entered by the time your battered corpse is being dragged through “Negative Birth” and “Coil” because, not quite done with ruining you completely, Lord Mantis will finish you off with the unrelenting ten-minute dirge of “Three Crosses.”

Coupled with their hatred for life in general, rumoured tension within the Lord Mantis ranks towards each other goes some way to explaining the level of depravity that Death Mask plunges into as it rumbles and rots its way through three quarters of an hour of abject, life-corroding misery. Put it this way, if you survive to the end in one piece I don’t know whether to shake your hand or run a fucking mile in fear.

Track Listing:

01. Body Choke
02. Death Mask
03. Posession Prayer
04. You Will Gag For The Fix
05. Negative Birth
06. Coil
07. Three Crosses

Run Time: 47:13
Release Date: April 29, 2014

Check out the song “Body Choke”