Undeath's 'It's Time...to Rise from the Grave' is bloody, gruesome fun 

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Picture driving a car on the freeway at 95 mph, the wind picking up as storm clouds creep over the horizon. The chassis is rattling in the most unsettling of ways and at any moment disaster seems imminent, even though your wheels have a tight grip on the road below.

That’s roughly how it feels listening to Rochester death metal quintet Undeath’s sophomore release, “It’s Time…to Rise from the Grave,” which officially will be released Friday. A follow-up to 2020’s “Lesions of a Different Kind,” the band’s second offering is a musical cataclysm, with the tracks held together by perpetual grooves and infectious riffing. “It’s Time…” is a masterwork of control over cacophony, of maintaining cohesion while teetering ever-so-close to complete destruction.

Death metal is, despite its gruesome exterior, a delicate art form. A band reveling in brutality still needs to have structure, a task Undeath takes to heart.

“Trying to write a catchy death metal song, it’s just like any other song,” said Kyle Beam, lead guitarist and main songwriter for Undeath. “You need a good idea, you need to expand on the idea, and the rest of the track needs to follow that idea.”

The band will be taking the act on a national tour starting in May, alongside Dying Fetus, Chelsea Grin, Bodysnatcher, and Frozen Soul. On Thursday, the band will host a listening party at Record Archive, featuring a new blood-red cranberry lager brewed in support by University Avenue's Nine Maidens Brewing Company.

The band will play the album in its entirety at the Bug Jar on Saturday, April 23, alongside Mutilatred, AfterBirth, Deal with God, and Internal Bleeding.

The album opens with the track “Fiend for Corpses,” which is stylistically similar to the 1990s Cannibal Corpse catalog. The song also sets the tone for “It’s Time...” with a pulsing yet punishing groove that permeates the rest of the tracks. Drummer
Matt Browning and guitarist Jared Welch create a rock-solid foundation that anchors the madness of Beam’s frantic guitar riffs and Alex Jones’s crushing, guttural vocals.

On “Bone Wrought,” Beam breaks into a spacey, discordant solo while the blasting rhythm section holds the track together. The band tauntingly approaches sheer noise before pulling back while maintaining its headbanging rhythmic lifeblood — a dynamic likely familiar to fans of experimental music and free jazz.

Extreme music tends to eschew pop sensibilities, favoring brutality over hooks and choruses. While Undeath creates loud, abrasive music, their songs follow clear structures. Jones’s vocals are guttural and intense, yet his lyrics are not indecipherable.

The result is ideal earworm fodder, best exemplified on the album’s title track, “Rise from the Grave.” The galloping guitar riffs conjure up memories of Entombed’s seminal album “Wolverine Blues.” In the chorus, Jones’s growls of “It’s time to rise from the grave” are nothing short of anthemic.

“Even in a genre like death metal that isn’t necessarily lyric-forward, I still like knowing what the people are saying,” Jones said in his 101st interview in promotion of the new album. “So I try to approach it with the same mentality.”

Undeath describes its sound as “skull-crushing death metal” and the same blood-and-guts imagery from “Lesions of a Different Kind” is alive and well on “It’s Time…”

The track “Human Chandelier” is about building a chandelier out of human bones. On “Necrobionics,” the band tells the story of a man being torn apart and rebuilt as a robo-human killing machine, with a chorus of “Biomechanical ligaments/ Bloody stumps turned super weapons.” Another track is pointedly titled “Head Splattered in Seven Different Ways.”

If it seems gratuitous or just plain goofy, that’s because it should be. While death metal can be a genre which can delve into illusory self-seriousness, Undeath plants its tongue firmly in-cheek. It’s a spectacle of macabre that’s heavy, intense, and brutal. Most importantly, it’s fun.

Gino Fanelli is a CITY staff writer. He can be reached at (585) 775-9692 or [email protected].