TOGETHER AS ONE
THEY ARE the band that would give your grandparents a heart attack if they knew you were heading off to their gig – two of Sydney’s most talented death-metal debonairs, churning out gristly and guttural slithers of pure sonic warfare. It’s hard to believe they only have one guitarist; Mitch Davis reckons with a wall of sound so mercilessly massive it should come with its own warning label.
THEY SOUND LIKE the artistic personification of despair; they’re named after a Trivium song, but they make Matt Heafy and co. look like the Teletubbies with their blistering breakdowns and soul-ravaging riffs.
YOU’LL DIG THEM IF YOU LIKE Machine Head, Sepultura and Code Orange. If you were the type of teen to have a morbid curiosity for things like the Faces Of Death series, there’s a good chance you have a soft spot for bands like Together As One, whose heaviness abides only by the bounds of their mixing software. Which, given how sharp their debut EP sounds in spite of its monstrous avalanche of gutturals and guitar, seems to be a pretty wide margin.
YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT that aforementioned debut EP, Crawl. It’s a decently weighty release, too, stuffing almost 40 minutes of mind-melting metal into a neat six-track bundle. Closing track “Grand Deception” is a particular highlight, slow-burning and kaleidoscopic, and certainly worthy of closing out such a transcendent package of power.