News : Crypt Return with ‘Disgusting Zombie Metal’ Boxset and Australian Tour!

It’s been 15 years since Brisbane based death metal act Crypt went on hiatus, but now, the band are back and returning to the stage in support of the release of their brand new boxset, ‘Disgusting Zombie Metal’; a collection compiling all of the band’s material from 1994-2000 in a 3CD boxset.

The box contains remastered editions of the Excruciating Agony Demo from 1994, The El-Nino album from 1998, and a remixed and remastered version of the 1995 self-titled EP – making up 38 tracks in total. It further includes a Crypt patch.

“Crypt have always been one of my favorite Australian Death Metal bands – crushingly heavy while retaining groove and originality. Long live their unique brand of Disgusting Zombie Metal This box set is a killer addition to every metal fans collection” – Dave Haley (PSYCROPTIC)

Pre-orders for ‘Disgusting Zombie Metal’ are available now!

www.nervegas.com.au/crypt-disgusting-zombie-metal-3cd
www.nervegas.com.au/crypt-disgusting-zombie-metal-cd-t-shirt-bundle

Be sure to catch Crypt on tour along the east coast this September!

Saturday, Spetember 10: Crowbar, Brisbane 
Saturday, September 17: The Tote, Melbourne
Thursday, September 29: The Bald Faced Stag, Sydney

LINER NOTES FOR BOX SET

For those who were there, the Australian Metal scene of the early 1990s, much in line with events happening all over the world, was a time of unity, head-rattling excitement and savage creativity.

When I think of those days now, I think of lawless wolf-children stalking the empty brick and glass canyons of Brisbane city, howling and bellowing at the moon. Free of restraint and combusting with the dark fire of a musical movement that seemed limitless in where it could go. From the primal, monstrous chug of Britain, to America’s increasingly finely-honed technical precision, the rattling attack of Brazil, and like a malevolent distant wind, stirrings in Europe of a dark wave approaching.

It was a crest period – a global push to take Metal further. A multi-fronted war on culture that laid the stones for this new, flourishing century. And Australia wasn’t afraid to step up. In the manner of the underdog, free of expectation or the eye of the world stage, dozens of bands would emerge, pushing outwards into the realms of what was possible. Pushing outwards through speed barriers, through tone density, through whatever rules had been laid down previously.

Working, tape trading, putting together tours and shows on the strength of personal connections and faith.  All for the glory and praise of this music that connected to us on a true, life-changing level.

And there is the difference between fame and glory. Fame is worthless – the ability to wave a pleasing trinket before a mob and receive your allotted ration of applause before being put back in the box you came out of. The pursuit of fools. Glory, though – the glory of recognition from a community that believes in itself and its craft, that could not give a fuck about the vagaries of popular culture, that respects its artists, that doesn’t separate its audience from the people on the stage at any given time –
this is the reward for those that would pursue the life of Metal.

And in that world, in the twisting hills and clapboard houses of Brisbane, was Crypt.

Nathan, Grant, Dave, Alan, Greg and Cliff were all contributors to the shambling, filth-caked monster known as Crypt, a monster that seemed to appear fully formed, bursting into the arena of Australian Metal like the jump-scare from one of the horror films that the band drew so deeply from. The Excruciating Agony cassette was a calling card to be reckoned with. Raw and punishing, with Grant’s apocalyptic, rockslide vocals immediately grabbing the listener by the hair and pulling us  through morbid tales of sacrifice, resurrection and vengeance.

A maniacal cryptkeeper, forcing stories of the dead upon us as the music – an unsettling combination of thrashing, relentless rhythm and stabbing, precise guitar punctuated by near-psychedelic explosions of chaotic phaser-driven

grind, took us on a stomach-churning descent into deep, foul caverns of sound.

The self titled Crypt EP plunges further into the mist, widening the scope of atrocity beyond its graveyard origins into something that feels like a panic-ridden, rain-soaked slasher pursuit. It’s the sound of running  footsteps in empty, freezing midnight lanes. 
The sound of panicked eyes rolling back into the head.

If Excruciating Agony and Crypt were like one of the flickering, grainy extreme horror films that we would trade amongst ourselves, El-Niño was an evolutionary leap forward. Tighter, more focused, like a cruel machine. The skin rotting away from the bone, leaving the grinning, eternal skull. Its teeth snapping as it creeps closer.  Its cold grip and its glaring, reddened eyes. No escape, no release from these delicious terrors. Aurally stripped back, cleaner and more direct  in its assault, El-Niño is the sound of a band whose skills have been honed by the hectic live shows that Crypt had been smashing the east coast of Australia with over the preceding four years.

A band at their peak. Which is where many bands could take a cue from Crypt. End it on a high note.  Build to that point – make the thing what it should be, realize its deepest, most primal trajectory. And then kill it.

But what beast in the landscape of the uncanny ever really remains dead? When these creatures are fuelled by our own darkness and fear, how can they remain in their tombs? When a thing exists

outside of the laws of nature, it is endless. Free of life, it is also free of death.

And so it returns. CRYPT. Black of heart, lurking with ghoulish joy for both the forgetful and the true, its skeletal claws twitching. Madness, fearlessness, the smoke-thickened stench of black,

sticky venues, the tinnitus ringing in the ears, the bruises and the puncture wounds, the speed and  the horror and the glory. CRYPT. Putrid, undead, resurgent. It will never rest. It will never remain buried.

The glory is theirs

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