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Disma - Towards The Megalith

Every Record I Own - Day 324: Disma Towards the Megalith

Sometimes bad people make good art.

Let’s get the positives out of the way... Disma is a New Jersey death metal band who excel at stupidly heavy, barbaric, gross riffs. There’s nothing flashy or particularly innovative about what they do, but if you have the slightest appreciation for the more primitive approach to death metal, you will understand the sonic appeal of Disma.

Now, here’s why I’m bummed I own this record. Vocalist Craig Pillard was in some dumb Nazi-themed industrial project. When the news broke online, the band asserted that Pillard’s fascination with fascism was in the past and that no one in the band was racist, which made a certain amount of sense considering Towards the Megalith came out on a record label owned by a person of color and that Disma also contained a member of the defunct left-leaning political hardcore band Citizen’s Arrest. I figured, hey, everyone makes mistakes, and it’s better to welcome ex-racists into the fold than to take the self-defeating position of “hey, you said something racist back in the day, so you might as well remain a racist because you’re never gonna be welcome here.” Ultimately, Disma’s music is apolitical and songs like “Chasm of Oceanus” are just too goddamn heavy to not have Towards the Megalith in my collection.

I was explaining this rationale to a friend recently only to be informed that the singer’s dumb neo-Nazi album was reissued in 2010 with hand-signed artwork by Pillard. Disma added Pillard to the band in 2009. Towards the Megalith was released in 2011. So even if Pillard isn’t currently endorsing racist ideologies, he didn’t mind peddling racist material after joining Disma.

Fuckin’ bummer.

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