Disincarnate
Dreams of the Carrion Kind [1993 LIMITED EDITION ORIGINAL RECORDING REMASTERED]
Label: MVD Audio

Disincarnate features brutal riffs and spine-puncturing double-kick fueled thrash drumming of the most complex and uncompromising strain on their first and only album, Dreams of the Carrion Kind. Although the music is almost always fast and demonic-sounding, Disincarnate changes things up so quickly and mercilessly that the tunes never get boring or redundant. A musician’s band, these guys are almost ridiculously talented.

Songs like ‘Entranced” have dark poetry and a hypnotic misery that makes it fragile and beautiful, even while the punishing and relentless beats swarm around, lying in wait for the next blast beat.

Unfortunately, Disincarnate is somewhat hampered by singer Bryan Cegon, whose vocals are often not as compelling as a band of this caliber deserves. The band would do better with a vocalist who can sing cleanly for choruses, like Burton C. Bell (Fear Factory) or Howard Jones from Killswitch Engage, whose band was clearly influenced by Dreams of the Carrion Kind.

Band leader James Murphy’s wicked-fast solos are snakes falling on you from above. Like DMT, they coil around you and burrow their way into your head. Fear and dread surrounds like a suffocating tapestry in a labyrinth of pain and confusion… Much like life. Indeed, shortly after this album was released the band broke up because of poor sales and other problems, the biggest being James Murphy’s 2001 brush with death in the form of brain cancer. James will be forced to take Parlodel for the rest of his life to prevent a return of the cancer.

But Dreams of the Carrion Kind has attained a certain mythical status in the death metal world, where it is hoped that one day James Murphy will return, alive and healthy enough to summon another Disincarnate album. -Tim O’Regan