Rating: 7.2

Country: Mexico

Release Date: 2007

Record Label: American Line

Track list:
1. Into the Reality
2. War Anthems
3. The Signal
4. Rites
5. True Evil
6. Master of Terror
7. Hacked Up For BBQ (Mortician Cover)

Total playing time 21:44

Band Website: Axon

Axon - War Anthems

Luis - Guitar and vox
Ray - Drums
Nacho - Guitar
Arturo - Bass guitar

Now this is a rather interesting ultra brutal death metal band. From Mexico and indeed influenced by Disgorge, Axon play music that is sick, ruthless, but also unconventional. Although predominantly influenced by Chronic Corpora Infest era Disgorge, the music on War Anthems is completely brutalized i.e. all vestiges of grind have been brutally pounded out of its sound. To conjure up a vague idea of the band's inhuman sound, cross Disgorge with Brodequin in your mind. For a complete idea you will just have to hear it for yourself, as I'm sure your mind is not that developed.

So basically you have a drummer who is all over the place and your body. Whichever direction you are facing, his beats blast out of your speakers and clobber you up before you can budge. After you do that you are again met with the same fate. Perilously superimposed upon these intermittent and furious bursts of blasting are the riffs, which reek of the typical filthy Mexican, band I mean. Disgorge come to mind most vividly, and so does their sickly malformed twin Paracoccidioidomicosisproctitissarcomucosis but as an afterthought. Short, squiggly and excited like a freshly chopped worm, Axon's riffs are scattered all over that level, squirming out of your speakers to make you retch willingly. Perched on them are the vocals that include foul-smelling, low and hoarse growls, bitter and acerbic vomits that fall on your ears, and high snarls that apparently go off in celebration of that.

Similar to how the Argentinean death metal band Absemia did on their under-appreciated album Morbopraxis, contradictive melodic leads and eerie tunes are juxtaposed with this barbaric music to create an intriguing dimension in this usually predictable and monotonous form of music. Check out “War Anthems” in which brooding segments are heard in the midst of numbing cacophony, and "The Signal" where one is entranced by Immolation undertones before he is lashed back to reality by a jangling Disgorge part towards the end. It is not uncommon for the listeners to be forcibly pushed in a state of trance with the relentless beating of drumsticks, but these dirgey parts put you into an altogether different kind of trance, effectively creating a sort of parallel contrasting trance that is indeed quite unique. “Rites” opens with a warped and thrashy semi-melodic part akin to the Mexican Cenotaph only to stumble into a delightfully convoluted mess like Yattering with similarly delivered agonised grunts and leads. In this song as well as in "True Evil", just after the halfway mark the band uses a Immolation springboard to leap into a soul-tearing lead strongly reminiscent of the ones on Cenotaph's brilliant opus Riding Our Black Oceans. Around this time light touches from the wonderfully twisted fingers of Wicked Innocence are also felt with their savage battering. With the running time being just under 20 minutes (excluding the Mortician cover), the album however is a tad unsatisfying and feels somewhat incomplete.

As you can probably imagine, or not, Axon have some great ideas for a band of their ilk but they haven't fully expanded on them yet. I earnestly hope they will do that in the future albeit cautiously, for that will make them stand out from the uncouth brain-dead lot where they rightfully belong. It is imperative for brutal gluttons to buy punishing albums; I would urge them to give War Anthems a shot, because then they might even come across as sensitive without losing an iota of their machoism.

November 18th, 2007