Dixieland was only a somewhat misleading title for Greet Death’s 2017 debut—the Flint, Michigan trio wasn’t pulling a Kid Rock, but paying tribute to a hometown flea market while they gleefully rummaged through used Midwestern relics. They incorporated the Smashing Pumpkins, Mark Kozelek, and Jason Molina at their most uncomfortably numb, broad-shouldered heavy acts like Cloakroom and Pelican, and even pulled some old Bob Seger records off the shelf. Even when songs were built on lyrics like, “Waking up dead on sheets of white,” or, “I’m going down,” Dixieland was oddly uplifting, three guys finding their purpose by reclaiming some of the bleakest music of their lifetimes. The reference points haven’t changed on their second LP, but Greet Death sound like they’ve actually lived them this time around, enough to justify making an album called New Hell on a label called Deathwish.
More than a realization of Dixieland’s promise, New Hell can be seen as the culmination of a decade where a wave of like-minded bands were lumped into shoegaze despite seemingly inverting its entire aesthetic of cocooned bliss. Instead of soft-focus vocals wrapped in sheets of trebly, white noise, acts like Greet Death bludgeoned with bottom-heavy production and guitars that sound forged from molten steel, only sharing shoegaze’s aim for sensory domination. Pedalboard gawkers might show up to a Greet Death gig a half-hour earlier to get a look at their distortion rig, but New Hell isn’t dirty or grimy itself, more comparable to heavy machinery coming up against the stubbornness of nature. The instrumentation of “Circles of Hell” variously resembles a bulldozer stalling against a massive pile of rubble or a power drill hitting impenetrable bedrock. The earth is a cold dead place on the frostbitten dirge “Entertainment,” as Sam Boyhtari’s guitar thuds like a shovel against solid dirt. The hyperbolically spiteful “Do You Feel Nothing” is the end result of all this digging, New Hell’s one moment of release that comes off like an extended, three-minute mudslide in the “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” video.
But the success of New Hell is mostly attributable to Greet Death’s newfound ability to synthesize Boyhtari and Logan Gaval’s distinct head voices—Boyhtari sings directly through his nasal passage, while Gaval moans in a DayQuil haze. On Dixieland, they did the logical thing and separated the two almost completely. Here, both make the most of their unique tones to represent the opposing forces of abject depression: Gaval is the voice of dejection, the one best suited for lyrics like, “I would kill myself completely out of spite,” or, “I sit around and I wait to get high,” as what comes across in his lethargic, drawn-out sighs is the inability to immediately access those maladaptive forms of relief and the impotent longing to speed up the process.
Meanwhile, Boyhtari is the sound of rejection, why the caged rat sings. Unlike Gaval, he relishes the idea of wasting all of his days as revenge against everyone who cares about him: “I hate my friends ’cause they don’t hate themselves,” he snarls on “Do You Feel Nothing?” justifying getting fucked up because he’s young, it still works, and it’s pretty much all he’s got going right now.
Impressive and imposing as Greet Death are in teardown mode, all the above serves as the foundation for “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done” and the closing title track—towering, nine-minute monuments to self-pity. Both are structured similarly and depending on your mood, they’re either offering ascendance one layer of fuzz at a time or boring deeper into the earth’s core. Either way, it’s an escape from the limbo that’s so painfully and accurately captured throughout New Hell. Having someone to help out is the one thing that keeps you rolling that boulder up that hill despite every temptation to just let it roll over you.
Buy: Rough Trade
