• Home
• News
• Features
• Reviews
• TV
• Photos
• Win
• Blog
• Magazine
• Merch
• Festivals

Trap Them - Seizures In Barren Praise

The country of Sweden has produced some killer music this past year - Dismember, Disfear, Unleashed...

Rating: 9

The country of Sweden has produced some killer music this past year - Dismember, Disfear, Unleashed, Cult Of Luna, Svarti Loghin and Grave to name a very small few - but in what may be the most stunning and most ironic of coups, it looks like one of the best Sverige-sounding death metal / grindcore albums of the year may have just come from a quartet whose only connection to the land of meatballs, Vikings and Ikea is a passport stamp and their record collection. In fact, not only do Trap Them hail from nowhere near Sweden, but vocalist Ryan McKenney is separated from his band mates - guitarist Brian Izzi, bassist Steve Lacour and new drummer Mike Justian [ex-The Red Chord, Unearth] - by about 3,000 miles of US soil. How Seizures In Barren Praise is able to sound so tensile, vicious and together is a testament to the ingredients of pedantry, meticulous obsession and blue-collar elbow grease, sweat and grime that comprises these dudes' grind 'n' death 'n' roll obsession.

Seizures continues McKenney's daily tale of a fictitious town in which an entire population just picks up and leaves after getting fed up with their prescribed lives. It opens with Day Nineteen: Fucking Viva, which recalls the mid-paced, axe-swinging of Entombed's glory years. From there, this New Hampshire and Seattle (McKenney is the Seattle part) quartet ignite a canister of Nasum-approved nitrous oxide and jump into hyper drive with Day Twenty-Six: Angels Anonymous In Transit and Day Twenty-Eight: Targets, combining grind's ferociousness, the raw baldness of Discharge and that classic, early 90s chainsaw guitar burl while never letting their fingers stray too far from hummable riffs, drum patterns that are part D-beat, part-Dave Lombardo and chemically acidic vocals.

When they slow it down to a bulldozer-like crawl, as in Day Twenty-Four: Gutterbomb Heaven On The Grid and Day Thirty-One: Mission Convincers, it's as if the earth's surface is cracking in randomly selected spots and vengefully swallowing humanity into her fiery mantle. A special mention must be given to Day Twenty-Five: Guignol Serene which is just about the catchiest, most cantankerous, most snarling, fucking rawking song heard around these parts in a long while - or at least since they pinned our ears back with Day Thirteen: The Protest Hour off their Seance Prime EP.

Trap Them have been causing a rustling in the underground since they first hit in 06 with their debut Sleepwell Deconstructor and now that they've grown as both song and riff writers and not eased up on the sonic irascibility one iota, expect sightings of folks playing air guitar while having their cranium caved in to become commonplace.

Kevin Stewart-Panko