by Kurt Orzeck
The best compliment a young band can receive actually comes in the form of a query delivered with a tone of disbelief: “Is this really your first record?” (Bonus points are allotted if an exclamation point follows the question mark, but Very Serious Journalists avoid those like a communicable form of cancer.)
Wait, where were we? Oh, right: At the start of our discussion about Ossuary’s Abhorrent Worship (Me Saco Un Ojo Records), which itself is the start of the band’s journey into making full-length records. The opening track, “Volitional Entropy,”begins almost immediately with a huge, heavy, lumbering. That’s a stark contrast to what’s now become the token, clichéd and pretentious way death-metal bands usually lift the drapes on a death-metal record—with an ethereal/haunting/foreboding/insert-adjective-here interlude before diving into ear-shattering, flabby-stomach-shaking.
With that in mind, it’s clear from the get-go that Ossuary are here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And they’re all out of bubblegum. Their expertise at drilling masterful metal riffage into the brains of their listeners is evident from start to finish on Abhorrent Worship. Their efforts are so well executed that they needn’t succumb to then contemporary death-metal trappings of overcomplicated, showboating technique—or take the easy route and focus on making every song faster and louder than the one before it. (Let’s let Lemmy keep that modus operandi with him in the grave, shall we?)
Instead, Ossuary keep a trained eye on repetitive heavy riffs so deliberately executed and with such a singular focus that Abhorrent Worship effectively guarantees listeners who dig their approach will listen to Ossuary’s first LP the whole way through, every time they pop the cassette into their tape deck. In taking that approach, the band incorporates doom metal’s greatest strengths. Even changes in time signature are few and far between. Ossuary don’t resort to gimmicks because they don’t need to: this band has already got the goods.
However—and this is an elephant-size however—Ossuary didn’t simply materialize in their hometown of Madison, Wisconsin with Abhorrent Worship in hand. It’s worth noting that the trio of guitarist/vocalist Izzi Plunkett, bassist Matt Jacobs and drummer Nick Johnson formed Ossuary in 2015, and that 10 years is a hell of a long time to take before putting out a debut LP. After all, we’re not exactly talking James Joyce or Avatar-level art here. But in the same way a person’s age often fades into the background during a profound conversation, any fixation on the amount of time a band spent making a record proves fleeting as well. (Does anyone even care anymore that it took 13 years for Tool to release Fear Inoculum, one of the best metal albums of the 2010s?) That said, one question that will be posed almost universally to Ossuary about the brilliant bludgeoning that is Abhorrent Worship: “Is this really your first record?”