Obscure death metal demo tapes from the 90’s are secretly my favorite shit on the planet. Malformity’s ‘Black Holes to Heaven’ is a set of mp3’s that had evaded me for a decade until they’d posted it on YouTube around 2014. The demo was very 1995 in style, as it showed a band exisiting post-Suffocation but still heavily influenced by late 80’s US death metal bands. It is a grisly, menacing demo that stomps and riffs like a helicopter with broken speakers attached to the blades. Fast forward twenty damn years and Malformity’s EP from 2016 ‘Lectures on the Apocalypse’ channeled a bit of that first Seance album ‘Fornever Laid to Rest’ with all of that band’s thrash inspired lead work and what I’d consider chugging Brutality-style riffs circa ‘Millennium’. I loved that EP and getting to hear their latest 7″ was exciting in terms of getting to hear new material and seeing where their sound might go on a full-length at some point.

Nothing is lost on the two songs that make up ‘The Rapturous Unraveling’ EP here and that means big, burly Florida death metal riffing with their mosh-intensive style. “Rapturous Dominion” sounds a bit like Anasarca covering Morbid Angel with it’s quasi-technical riffs and absolutely slamming drumming. “Unraveling” shows off the band’s other major influences in it’s inherent Bolt Thrower-meets-Dismember circa 1994 sound. I can’t think of a better showcase for being introduced to the sound of Malformity and their fine-tuned, bristling death metal presence. Malformity gets old school death metal right not only because they’re a surviving relic of the past, but because they still understand that death metal lives and dies in the minds of fans on the corpse of the riff and inherently memorable song structures. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for a full-length!

Unconquered ancients. 3.75/5.0

<strong>Help Support Grizzly Butts’ goals with a donation:</strong>

Please consider donating directly to site costs and project funding using PayPal.

$1.00