Band:	Landmine Marathon
Album:	Gallows
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	September 27, 2011
A review by:	BitterCOld

01. Three Snake Leaves
02. Cutting Flesh And Bone
03. Knife From My Sleeve
04. Liver And Lungs
05. Dead Horses
06. Cloaked In Red
07. Beaten And Left Blind
08. Morbidity

In Leviathan, the book, not the band, Hobbes, the philosopher, not the stuffed tiger, described life in the state of every man's war against every man as "...nasty, brutish, and short."

The same could be said for Landmine Marathon's Gallows.

Their latest features just seven tracks and just under 30 minutes of visceral, raw(r!) grinding death punishment. Nasty. Brutish. Short.

Grace Perry continues to froth, scream, and contort like some acid-tongued banshee whose scornful voice possesses the ability to strip the paint off your car at 30 meters. The female front person thing is perhaps still a bit gimmicky in metal as a whole... "I'm a Barbie Girl in a Metal World!" Angels singing beautiful soprano in front of and above the band. Or those that go out of their way to dress, look, and act the part. Fuck that noise. Grace Perry is G.I. Jane and knows 23 ways to kill you with her drivers license and four more with her voice. She gets backed up at times with some atypical DM male roars in some twisted duet.

The knuckledragging 26.2 milers back up this horrific screeching by flailing away at their instruments with reckless abandon. The tempo? A mile a minute, which given the run time means if you kept pace you could damn near finish the marathon before the album comes to a close. Provided you don't stomp on a claymore and blow yourself to hell. Sure, there are some of the slowed down grinding bits, such as the intro portion of "Knife From My Sleeve", but make no mistake, the vast bulk of Gallows is played at "ludicrous speed."

Furthermore, the band not only plays fast (bah, everyone does that nowadays) but they have the knack for playing with this galloping groove that makes the songs almost catchy. It's some great work by the guitarists... the riffs don't stand out and draw attention on their own so much as work within the cacophony of pounding drums and throat-shredding vocals. It's more a gestalt whole, a solid unit, rather than a collection of assembled parts.

Finally the production is not nearly as polished as a lot of modern DM, which helps this harken back to the good old days of the early 90's when the music spewing forth from the swamps of Florida was raw and vile. Modern DM seems like a sterilized scalpel which clinically dissects the listener... the old school was more getting hacked apart by a rusty hatchet. Landmine Marathon definitely lean in the direction of the hatchet-wielders.

Ultimately, unlike 2010's Sovereign Descent, which never really clicked with me, I've found Gallows to be more fun than a monkey knife fight.