Dealey Plaza – “Deliver Us” [Album Review]

In the world of deathcore there is the genre’s “commercial” side (if there can be such a thing) with bands like Suicide Silence, who have written heavy music that gets airplay on more commercial rock radio stations alongside their magazine covers, whereas on the other hand you have acts like Dallas brutalists Dealey Plaza who dish out a different sound that’s dark, nasty, and filthy.

Don’t get me wrong, bands like Suicide Silence still have that element to their sound but, these days, the business element has come into it and it’s as much about shifting units and selling tickets as it is about being br00tal. An album like Deliver Us, however, is quite simply about being as heavy and disturbing as fuck. Much like the UK’s very own Black Tongue, Dealey Plaza walk a disturbing path on their new album with a sound that has that air about it, the kind that is similar to that feeling you get walking home down a dark road late at night and you feel like you’re being followed.

Swathes of downtuned, sludgy guitars and punishingly heavy drums fill the air as the band chug, blast and scream through the likes of “Succubus” accompanied by frontman Bryan Long who spits his bilious lyrics in an equally uncompromising fashion. Add to the mix that pungent, suffocating air that these kind of bands make use of really effectively and the end result is very much an uneasy listen.

It’s difficult to market an album like this because, unlike the commercial heavy bands, there is no proper outlet for this kind of brutality. Bands like Black Tongue, Oceano, and Dealey Plaza play disturbing, uncompromising music that has its niche audience but, like say the underground black metal scene, is so far removed from what your average metal-buying fan would listen to that it’s probably going to stay that way. However, when compared to the rest of their genre counterparts, Deliver Us is a prime example of how disturbingly heavy this genre can be.

Track Listing:

01. Notable Entity
02. Two Wolves
03. Succubus
04. Altered
05. Lead Poisoning
06. Dead Anxiety
07. Confess
08. The Courtesan And The Sitar Man
09. Farewell, Farewell
10. Oh, How The Mighty Have Fallen
11. And Again I’m Broken (The Hanging II)
12. Begotten

Run Time: 36:11
Release Date: August 11, 2015

Check out the song “Farewell, Farewell” here.