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| Ulcerate's fourth album, Vermis, drops this September. |
In the field of Death metal, it’s becoming increasingly hard to stand out from the crowd. Progress is often limited to incestuous genre hybridization, so bands turn to advertising themselves as the most “intense” and “brutal” out there. Immolation created suffocating dissonance, Morbid Angel perfected blast-beat thunder, and Death injected the genre with philosophy and unpredictability, so it would seem there’s little left to say that hasn’t already been screamed. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, Michael Hoggard and Jamie Saint-Merat decided it was time for the genre to take a step back and breathe a little. Born of their insane guitar and drum chops in 2000, Ulcerate started as a talented but otherwise unremarkable death metal outfit. After the band added and dropped a number of musicians, it settled on a trio of Hoggard, Saint-Merat and bassist/vocalist Paul Kelland. Those three would lay down the album Everything is Fire, and for once, death metal had a legitimately fresh sound.
