Only Death Is Eternal, the new tape from crusty death metal band Doldrey, is among the most thrilling, hugely satisfying releases from the metal underground so far this year. Unstaunched energy, massively chunky riffage, a general sensibility that’s as nasty as it is raw and exciting — all those things characterize Doldrey’s sound more or less adequately, but we’ve heard those words before, and none of them captures what’s so engaging and immediate in these songs. The sorta-stale typicality of those descriptors is complemented by the symbolics of the band’s output; all the muscled warriors and carnage in the titles and j-card art operate somewhere very remote from our everyday realities. But somehow Only Death Is Eternal is right there, fitted into the most aggro contours of the current conjuncture. It’s a terrific record.
Likely Doldrey would be wise to approach the ideological problematics of our social moment with some tentative, distant maneuvering. The band is from Singapore, and while young men are no longer subject to arrest if they wear their hair a bit long in that city-state, its dominant culture and legal-juridical apparatus still skew strongly toward the conservative. Death metal and especially crust (with that subgenre’s strong orientation toward lefty radicalism) are likely perceived as expressions of undesirable politics, and of aberrant personality.
Hence, perhaps, Doldrey’s semiotics, most of which can be traced to Kentaro Miura’s manga Berserk. (Doldrey, I am told, is the name of a fortress important in one of the long-running comic’s early narrative arcs.) That explains the swords-and-sorcery proclivities of the band’s album art and the overheated language of some of its song titles: “Blood of the Serpent,” “Torture Paradise,” “All Is Hell.” Those read like a middle-schooler’s sense of the profound, or of the profoundly brutal, if that middle schooler had been brought up on a steady diet of Conan the Barbarian, Moorcock’s Eternal Champion stories and, well, Berserk.
The nerd-factor associated with piles of mass-market paperbacks and endless trips to the comic book shop is effective cover. And maybe it’s not really (or not just) cover. Berserk’s most emphatic symbolic element is its pervasive and hyper-graphic violence, some of which has disturbing scope and awfully imagined cruelty. Doldrey’s music taps into some of that intensity, especially in the heaviness of its death metal buzz and thunder. Check out the middle section of “Moral Decay” or the last third of the title track. Still got all your teeth? Better turn it up louder. And try not to think about ongoing genocidal wars or immiserating modes of human exploitation when you do so. Good luck with that.
Beyond the implied fascination with bloodshed and the nods to Swedeath unpleasantness, it’s the crusty stuff that lifts the record into the musical midnight sun. This reviewer loves the forty or so seconds of flat-out intensity in the middle of “All Is Hell” (beginning just after the guitar solo) and the opening 90 seconds of “Societal Machine.” You can just about smell the filthy denim and feel the greasy leather, all crowding into a moldy basement space. And in that crush of bodies, you’re happy about it all: the smell, the feel, the sense of being among like-minded freaks. Allies, as it were.
None of that will dispel the nightmare that is 2024’s ongoing tilt toward fascism, a mind-boggling combo of scenes as awful as the race-rioting in the UK and as stupid as Hulk Hogan ripping open his tee shirt on the RNC podium. Berserk? Yes, but also all too real. Doldrey has our soundtrack ready.
