It’s nearly October, which means it’s time to unpack the outerwear, and just in time, unheralded Wisconsin death crew Outer Graves drop an abrasive piece of outer space-themed death metal called Terminal Limit to chill your sunny disposition into a wintery pale. Their recipe is vintage death force-fed through a grind filter with touches of black metal madness crisping the edges. The result is uniformly caustic, savage, and chaotic, without a trace of melo or prog to be found. This indicates the experiment was at least a partial success and the brew master should be awarded a large hog and a flagon of the most vile beer cheese the Badger State has available. At a skinny 27 minutes, there may not be much meat on the gravebone, but what is here will fuck you up like a space chicken and stow you away bloody and bruised. Is this a good or a bad thing though?
The sound harnessed by Outer Graves is akin to an electrified power hammer set to “Smash the Poser” and left to run amok over a holiday weekend. Opener “Scavenger” sets a grueling pace with ragged, distorted guitars grinding your ears into ass-dust as Kate Coysh screams bloody murder with some of the most uncomfortable vocals you’ll hear this year. She sounds like she’s in the grips of a hefty demonic possession while also trying to shake off an Alpha strain of Covid, and at no point does she approach human. Battering ram grooves arrive to breech your ear gates and make off with your wax booty and everything feels excessive and over the top.1 You might not realize that “Scavenger” ends ” and “Hostile Anomaly” begins as they are so similar. It’s another skull-dusting dose of merciless, oppressive grooves, pounding toms-foolery, and wretched vocals and by the end, you’ll start to feel quite on edge.
Terminal Limit by Outer Graves
The major weakness of Terminal Limit is that a listener is liable to reach their own terminal limit before the 26-minute mark. While “Distress Beacon” is a highlight where they dial things back, it’s around this time that I began to feel hemmed in and agitated by the record’s relentlessly one-note bone smash broth. Outer Graves has good elements, but the writing is so static and unidirectional that it gets tedious and oppressive (not in a good way). Taken in isolation, you can find strengths in individual cuts. “Seismic Scourge” is an absolute cesspool of slithering Incanto-lation riffs with suckers that bite. “Re-Entry” is one filthy, brutal groove stacked atop another and the whole thing feels unsafe. And the aforementioned “Distress Beacon” has a mid-paced feel that spotlights Kate Coysh’s truly insane vocals, which rip and rasp and sound like a rabid raccoon stuck in barbed wire. The fact that all the songs are in the 3-to-4-minute window is good, but given the toxic quality of the material, they could stand to pare songs back even more in the future.
If there’s one overriding reason to hear Terminal Limit, it’s for the unvarnished and savage performance by Kate Coysh. Her sick blackened death wails and roars are unpleasant and unsettling. They will likely be love or hate for most, and as impressed as I am with them, they do wear thin after a while. Zachary Muffett brings the death hammer down with plenty of jagged, ragged riffs and locks into mammoth grooves that test the will to endure. He’s good at bringing pandemonium to your brain waves, but more diversity in approach would be a great blessing. Ryan Shaw’s rumbling bass is a welcome presence when it comes forward and more of that would also be welcome.
Outer Graves are the new kids on the chopping block and they do enough good things on their Terminal Limit debut to get me interested in seeing how they evolve. That said, I likely won’t be spinning the album much in toto though I will grab the best lifeforms for my Soundtrack for the Alien Apocalypse playlist.2 Aural masochists may get more mileage out of this than me, finding something interesting in development here, but Terminal Limit needed extra time in the polishing vault.
Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: NA | Format Reviewed: Fucking Soundcloud!
Label: Independent
Websites: outergraves.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/people/outer-graves | instagram.com/outergravesofficial
Releases Worldwide: September 20th, 2024
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