COFFINS - Buried Death LP

20 Buck Spin finally unleashes the first vinyl repress of Coffins’ seminal, long-out-of-print third album Buried Death to commemorate the release of their new full-length on Relapse Records, their first in five years. This edition is available on both black vinyl and blue / white “haze” colored vinyl and duplicates the original’s layout including gatefold sleeve.

On Buried Death, the Tokyo band established themselves as one of the underground’s leading purveyors of neanderthal-paced doom / death metal. Previous releases, The Other Side of Blasphemy and Mortuary in Darkness, introduced Coffins’ black-tar dirge to an audience eager for slowppressive, maniac riffs and songs that dragged like the knuckles of a lumbering simian. This is derivative and true rather then progressive and new, with an effectiveness unmatched in today’s underground.

Immediately battering the listener with the opening sledgehammer “Under the Stench,” Buried Death crawls forward through the band’s catchiest tracks ever, such as the Celtic-Frost-at-16-RPM narcoplunder of “Cadaver Blood.” The patented brick-heavy guitar tone remains, while the band delivers some additional solos and high vocal screams, hinted at on 2006’s The Other Side of Blasphemy album. Rather than toy with forced “evolution,” Coffins has instead sharpened and honed its devolved sound further toward primitive singlemindedness.

“... seas of fire that dare to cease into one great phallic tree of scorched black magma; plate-shifting, fault-felling divergence. That’s goddamned guitar tone.” —Stewart Voegtlin, Dusted