ACEPHALIX

Always one of the most prized and perverted live assaults to experience in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, Acephalix have consistently been one of the most malevolent, barbaric and putrid bands to ever emerge from the San Francisco metal/punk scene. Like a sacrilegious living bolide, Acephalix's existence has always been one of living recklessly always on the edge and with the foot always nailed to the accelerator, ready to burn bright and fast rather than to lead a life of tameness and irrelevance. The bastard existence of Acephalix thus began in 2006 as a deranged crust punk band out of a shared love for Sacrilege, Cro-Mags, Wolfpack, Nausea etc. by guitarist Kyle House (ex-Poison Idea, ex-Defiance, future founding guitarist of Vastum, and of Serpents of Dawn) and vocalist Dan Butler (future vocalist and founding member of Vastum), emerging silently and out of nowhere from the San Francisco punk scene, and within weeks of securing a semi-stable lineup instantly made a name for itself for being a savage and bludgeoning live killing machine. It was when the band linked up with drummer Dave Benson (Depressor), second guitarist Gabe Gavriloff (also of Depressor) and then recently emigrated Italian bassist Luca Indrio (future bassist and founding member of both Vastum and Necrot) that things started to take a harrowing turn for Acephalix. With a solid lineup more resembling a blood-thirsty war machine, and riffs that could cascade for days crushing everything in their wake, the band was clearly ready to spread its ugly wings. The debut album Aporia dropped on revered Bay Area crust label Prank Records, earning the band quite an infamous reputation of being a deviated and super heavy crust punk band dealing with themes of death and perversion. Clearly something ugly and heathen as fuck had been birthed that was destined to take even uglier turns in their short but incinerating existence. The band lost Gavriloff shortly after and having now fully embraced death metal, opted to ditch a second guitarist replacement, stripped down their sound to the essentials, and drove their aesthetic full frontal into a wall of death, taking queues from Scandinavian legends like Nihilist, Dismember, Demigod etc, and incorporating the hateful and reckless approach of primitive buzzssawing death metal into their already unclean crust punk framework, birthing something of truly monstrous proportions. More awe-inducing stage savagery across many shows built the band's reputation of being an unfuckwithable threat even further, and soon the word started to spread outside of the Bay that something truly hideous was lurking within. A new demo tape landed in the hands of Todd Jones from Nails, who in turn passed it along to Southern Lord's Greg Anderson. Southern Lord signed Acephalix on the spot and released their punishing Intemrianble Night compilation (which also saw a vinyl release on prized EU crust label Agipunk), and soon after their jaw-dropping and flesh-reaping second LP Deathless Master was birthed, also released by Southern Lord. At this point the band was laying the West Coast to waste with its humiliating live sets and its fame of being a death machine incarnated spreading like wildfire. West Coast tours with Danish death horde Undergang followed, including an extensive Euro tour, so did appearances at the Southern Lord "Power of the Riff" showcase along side legends like Winter, Noothgrush, Black Breath, Pentagram, Eyehategod, etc., as well as shows with Autopsy, and beyond, until point blank and with no explainable reason the band dissolved into nothing around 2011, silently fading from public eye and almost closing their cycle just as they had wanted it to be: hard, fast, reckless, and till the death. No one in the Bay Area really accepted their end and such, urged by friends for a comeback and rekindled by a new putrid fire, the band made their comeback in 2015 playing a few selected shows and finally getting in the studio to write and record their most regressed, jagged, primitive, barbaric and involved masterpiece of total death metal chaos to date: 2017's horrendous and heinous Decreation.

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