Carnifex - Bury Me in Blasphemy

I had no idea Carnifex had a new EP in the works, but by chance I have been listening to them a lot during my exercise lately (their 2016 album, Slow Death, especially), so this EP that dropped this Friday ended up being quite a timely surprise for me.
It’s a pretty minor, 4-track release from them, we get one original song (the titular track), a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole”, a cover of Slipknot’s “The Heretic Anthem”, and a Gost-remixed version of their Nine Inch Nails cover.
The EP starts with the band’s original song “Bury Me in Blasphemy”, a pretty standard cut for the band at this point in their evolution, much like something that might have showed up on Slow Death. I like the main groove and the big riff that rounds the song off in tandem with a string section. Well-mixed, well-supplemented with what what sound like synthetic strings and even horns at some points, and sufficiently brutal, it’s a satisfying little bonus addition to deathcore’s quiet 2018 and Carnifex’s catalog.
The band follows with the Nine Inch Nails cover, which takes a deliciously groovy approach to the introductory riff from the original song and turns the song into a mid-paced, semi-djenty deathcore chugger, which I am all for. It’s crunchy and groovy all the way through; I’m reminded a bit of The Acacia Strain’s cover of “Black Hole Sun” on that collaborative release with Thy Art Is Murder and Fit for an Autopsy a few years ago.
The band’s cover of “The Heretic Anthem” is a bit underwhelming as kind of a generic deathcore-esque reimagining of the track that still wants to stay true to the original. Scott Lewis doesn’t really make the most of his vocal abilities and performs the track rather monotonously. My disappointment perhaps also comes from my adoration for Periphery’s phenomenal cover of this song. If you hate Perpiphery because of Spencer’s clean vocal style, don’t worry, there’s no room in that song for them, but it does showcase his gruff vocal talent in a rather convincing format that does more than justice to the original. I was hoping Carnifex could provide a little deathcore oompf to their cover rather than the dryness of deathcore at its most cut-and-paste.
The electro-beat driven remix of “Head Like a Hole” does well to center around the groovy riff the song’s intro is based on that band transposes onto the down-tuned guitars and focuses on what the band does well on the cover in its more brooding take on Carnifex’s cover.
This is, again, a nice surprise from the band late in the year. I wish, perhaps, that the title track more boldly set itself apart from the band’s previous work and that the Slipknot cover was more emphatic, but I can’t really complain too much. It’s nice to hear some new Carnifex this year, and I sure do hope to hear a follow-up to Slow Death next year.

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