A Haunting Curse

It's 75 degrees and sunny in St. Petersburg, FL but within the pleasant confines of producer Erik Rutan's increasingly popular Mana Studios come the sounds of the apocalypse; tones of the rhythmically sinister and fist-clenchingly metal variety. It is the audible battery of Goatwhore's Metal Blade debut A Haunting Curse. More molten than its gloomier predecessor, the disc stays true to the band's original irreverent Bathory-meets-Baal (the god of thunder) in a bullpen sensibility with punkish resolve and those inimitable Louisiana grooves for which the band has become known. Songs like ber oldschool "Bloodletting Upon The Cloven Hoof," the opening "Wear These Scars Of Testimony" and "Silence Marked By The Breaking Of Bone" are fast, dark and antagonistic, Falgoust's commanding voice and challenging lyrics adding knee-buckling severity to their collective instrumental agility. Rhythms collide with stop-on-a-dime accuracy and Duet's vexing riffs give things a torrential horns-to-the-sky exigency. A Haunting Curse is here to devour. You have been warned.