As The Ghosts Collect, The Corpses Rest by Plague Bringer

"Josh and I have always been on the same page artistically, and I knew that he could translate the emotion that I was striving for within the music into words perfectly". After quickly finding his own vocal abilities limiting, he suggested that Josh, who despite never being in a band, become the voice of Plague Bringer. Josh enthusiastically accepted the offer. It was their second rehearsal where Josh proved his intensity and inadvertently 'discovered' the physicality involved in being the front man. He let out a great sounding scream, just the perfect pitch, Greg recalls, and I turn to see him fall to the ground, eyes rolled back in his head, and he's twitching. Anybody who is willing to disregard their own personal safety and scream hard enough to pass out thats who I want as the singer of my band". Highly talented drummers have offered their services, but the band began with and has chosen to continue using the drum machine, which has become just as significant to the Plague Bringer sound as either human member. Plague Bringer is Greg, myself and that drum machine, Josh proclaims. If we took on a drummer, it would probably sound great, but it would not be Plague Bringer. In addition to offering an extremely tight percussive sound, this metal duet sans drummer consistently obliterates expectations at their live shows. Plague Bringer has played countless shows in the mid-west with the likes of; PSYOPUS, MISERY INDEX, THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER, INTERNAL BLEEDING, THE END, MUTILATED, PUTRID PILE, HEWHOCORRUPTS and THE LOCUST, and toured with BODIES IN THE GEARS OF THE APPARATUS in August of 2004, and with HARLOTS in the winter of 2005. In the summer of 2005, the band completed work on their self-produced debut full-length album, As the Ghosts Collect the Corpses Rest which was mastered by Scott Hull (PIG DESTROYER/AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED) and released on their own Lo-Fi Violence Recordings. Upon the album's completion they packed up the mini van and set out for a two-week journey to the East Coast which included shows with NEURAXIS, KHANATE and MOUTH OF THE ARCHITECT. Plague Bringer continues to be a devastating presence in the metal underground converting skeptics of the drum machine genre into believers in the Plague.

From Blabbermouth.net:

Speedier than GODFLESH, yet not as frantic as PIG DESTROYER, Chicago's two-man programmed blitzkrieg machine, PLAGUE BRINGER, dishes out wave after wave of bulldozer riffs and jackhammer rhythms. Probably better described as mechanized death metal than frenetic grindcore, the riffs are fat, the blasting sadistic, and the screeching of Josh Rosenthal (accented with the death growls of, I would assume, guitarist/programmer Greg Ratajczak) blood thirsty and maniacal.

Rather than mere noise and chaos, there is a definite rhyme and a reason to these arrangements, the duo somehow able to maintain a restless grindcore vibe with song structures that actually go somewhere, albeit in a MINISTRY-on-meth kind of way. Though what is heard is largely the sheer ferociousness of Ratajczak's riff bludgeoning and the extreme crush of the drum programming, light electronics serve to put a chill into the arrangements. The riffing on "Burn Ward Whore" (song title of the year?) may melt flesh, yet is also composed in such as a way as to inject slivers of melody and appealing nuance into the mix. The clean picking lulling one into a false sense of security on "No Such Nothing" ultimately gives way to more machine gun bursts and shrapnel blasts. And still the duo incorporates tempo breaks and chunkiness in just the right place. The song is but one example of an album that no one would ever claim to be easy on the central nervous system, and yet the songs are not simply mindless exercises in purposeful annoyance (though you may want to ask the neighbors about that after they've endured the album a few times).

Of course, "As the Ghosts Collect, The Corpses Rest" would be nothing without the apocalyptic vibes and constant sense of danger one feels while being beaten bloody by this soundtrack to man's ultimate demise. The boys seem to possess that indefinable "it," and I have a feeling that we have not even begun to experience this band's true potential for sheer audio terror.

From Antimusic.com:

The more I allow myself to be pummeled, raped, and stabbed by the half-hour of electric diode torture that As the Ghosts Collect, the Corpses Rest is, I find myself thinking time and time again just how accurate the moniker Plague Bringer really is. Much like the sickness it claims as its calling card, this Chicago two-piece is deadly AND infectious at the same time; the utterly deranged hyper-grind on offer here is some of the sickest, most brutal music to be dropped in my mailbox this entire year.

What makes this music so completely skull-crushing is the sound these guys have warped as their own. Picture the likes of Pig Destroyer, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, or what have you, and then drug them out of their minds on tranquilizers. When they're good and higher than kites, have them go to a cemetery dedicated to long-dead industrial stomp bands and have them dig up the corpse of Godflesh, desecrate it beyond recognition, and perform a few Satanic rituals to boot. The end result is some marrow chilling concoction somewhere between a mid-paced crawl of rumbling steamrollers crushing your legs while slicing knives flay the skin off your upper portions. Both blindingly fast and slow to the point of agony, Plague Bringer is like that unseen outbreak of epidemic that makes everyone really sick for a long time before they all die randomly in record numbers.

"Burn Ward Whore" kicks things off with a brutal, industrialized factory line of stomping guitars and manic drum tracks. The drum machine is actually so robotic it sounds organic, it's hyper, blistering beats fitting perfectly with the sledgehammer swings these meaty riffs are. "Hope and Slow Murder" lashes out right after "Burn Ward Whore" finishes its share of the ass-kicking, a cymbal splash ending that latter song to kick off the former. "Hope and Slow Murder" is primal grind slowed to the point of being meaty, blood-soaked sludge. It's like somebody spilled all their organs in a puddle of mud and ooze, and I couldn't like the slow-paced insanity better than what I do. I'd also like to point out a part or two where the guitars take on a billowing, spaced-out feel that reminds me of more crushing portions from ISIS. Pretty dense stuff, and not something you'd expect in this or maybe any genre. "No Such Nothing" is birthed off a wispy, quiet folk interlude which soon receives a round of nail gun piercings via warpspeed drums and some of the entire album's most furious, caustic riffs. "Halo Trauma" sounds like having your ears stapled to railroad tracks, and the subsequent approach of a bullet train focused on turning you into visceral paste. The animal shriek/gore growls vocal duels are really wicked too, and add to the atmosphere with a manic sense of cloying sanity, furthered even more by a jazzy, off-kilter clean passage mid-track. "The Somnabulist" has some brutal industrial tones to its swirling vortex of blood and slime, but doesn't have enough length to it to truly see-saw between riffs and box your ears properly. "Splinters Through a Straw" kicks off with an oddly epic roar before launching into low hypergrind that churns and mutilates like a blender. The odd dissonant note here and there really adds some extra spice to the track, and this is one really sick song! Closer "Impaled Faith" is six minutes of destruction and devastation, a breakdown giving way to meaty space grind riffs and gruesome brutality.

Vicious, gripping, and scary, this disc is a unique edition to the grind cannon, which seems to be in a resurgence of sorts and is growing into quite the place for avant-garde experimentation. I honestly can't recommend this massacre of an album enough, so do yourself a favor and spread the disease.

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