Malthusian (mem Altar of Plagues) released a demo (stream it)

November 12, 2013

by Wyatt Marshall

Fans of avant garde black metal were understandably upset when Ireland’s Altar of Plagues called it quits earlier this year, but at least we got one last killer album out of them in Teethed Glory and Injury (watch a video below). Main man James Kelly recently began his WIFE project, and now another member of Altar of Plagues took his talents to another band, the brand new black/death/doom specialists Malthusian. We premiered their debut demo, MXIII, over on Invisible Oranges earlier today, and you can listen to the stream below. First, here’s what we had to say about it.

The three tracks on MXIII are bestial and grating, yet rich and complex–this is thinking man’s metal just as much as it is primitive blunt trauma. The name Malthusian comes from the British scholar and man of the cloth Robert Malthus, who predicted an ugly end for humanity in what is known as the Malthusian catastrophe: at a certain point in the propagation of the human race, population growth will outpace agricultural production, leading to a collapse of society and a return to subsistence-level existence. In other words, like at least one of his more prickly predecessors, Malthus perhaps thought life in the future would be poor, nasty, brutish and short–and the world’s population was hovering around the now-quaint billion mark when he died in 1834. What he didn’t foresee were leaps in technology that would circumvent his dire predictions. In an interview with Metal Ireland, Malthusian addresses its namesake, and says that we can expect a fuller exploration of Malthus’s influence on their next release.

In case you missed it, last Friday Invisible Oranges broke down Death Metal English–the lexicon of verbiage used by death metal singers to brutalize/evilfy death metal songs. Here’s a sample: