PESSIMIST Cult Of The Initiated (1997) CD

Late nineties American brutal death metal existed in a particular pocket of controlled chaos, and Pessimist were one of the acts doing it properly. Cult of the Initiated landed in 1997 on Lethal Records and promptly got filed under "why doesn't everyone know about this" by anyone who bothered to track it down.

Kelly McLauchlin's guitar work here is genuinely unhinged in the best way, all churning low-end riffage and blastbeat-fuelled brutality that sits comfortably alongside the genre's heavyweights without owing too much to any of them. This is the kind of death metal record that rewards attention, not just volume. Raw, dense, relentless. A legitimate artefact of the American underground at its most ferocious.

CD. Full length studio album. Originally released 1997 on Lethal Records. USA origin. Brutal death metal.

Fans of: Traitor, Hatchet, Eradicator, early Morbid Angel, Malevolent Creation.