Primitive Weapons wouldn't sound out of place sharing a stage with just about any heavy band you can think of from the last 25 years. It takes a great deal of dexterity to blend the all-out, histrionic abrasion of Converge and straight-ahead melodics of Warrior Soul, but The Future of Death, Primitive Weapons' sophomore album, takes listeners to the equator between those two poles. This is not entirely surprising given that the Brooklyn quartet's members spent their formative years—as both listeners and musicians—knocking around a New York/New Jersey/Long Island scene that ran the gamut from melodic hardcore like Quicksand, Glassjaw, and Vision of Disorder on one end and heavy-as-shit extremity like Human Remains and The Dillinger Escape Plan on the other. The band's collective resume, in fact, includes not one but two Quicksand spinoff acts (World's Fastest Car and Instruction) as well as groups like Mind Over Matter, Gay for Johnny Depp, and a slew of others. Today, all four members have ownership stakes in Brooklyn bars and restaurants, most notably the renowned metal venue Saint Vitus, a hot destination for touring acts.
Perhaps it's this ear to both the local and global pulse that gives The Future of Death a fluidity that's bound to speak to disparate breeds of fans. Dean Baltulonis' recording doesn't hurt either. Where producer Alex Newport emphasized Primitive Weapons' raw brutality on their self-titled EP, Baltulonis (Sick of It All, The Hold Steady) follows guitarist Arty Shepherd's lead in carving out more space for atmosphere and dynamics after the departure of second guitarist Justin Scurti. Together, Shepherd, bassist Eric Odness and drummer Chris Enriquez alternate between doomish menace (the descending, cobra-like riff that drives album opener "Ashes or Paradise"), straight-ahead pummeling ("Night Eyes"), pressure-cooked brooding ("Whistle Past the Graveyard"), and herky-jerky odd-metered grooves (the verses of "Old Miami," where it feels like the ground is shifting under your feet and you can't quite locate the downbeat to steady your footing).
On "Panopticon Blues," a critique on the loss of privacy in the digital age and perhaps the album's most varied tune, a hi hat/rolling tom tom pattern veers towards a hulking strain of new wave or even disco. About a third of the way through, however, the song launches into a standard mosh breakdown only to then, in another twist, vaporize, leaving room for Shepherd's repeating chant of "We're watched / We're trapped / We're never alone" as his spooky background vocals haunt the empty shell that's left of the song by its conclusion. Vocalist David Castillo favors a more traditional death metal bark in the other band he fronts, White Widows Pact. But in Primitive Weapons, he channels his lyrical focus into a broader human scope and, as a result, comes across as less irate, a person who prefers to express what bothers him in the form of abstract poetry. "What I'm asking for is so much more / than another pound of flesh for a song," Castillo sings on "Whistle Past the Graveyard." The Future of Death's balance between brain, brawn, and heart is so perfectly calibrated that the audience gets more than the usual pound of flesh as well.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the producer of 2012's The Shadow Gallery. It is Dean Baltulonis.
