After debuting in 2015 with their staggering first EP Pears of Anguish, Los Angeles deathrock night stalkers Deth Crux (who feature in their ranks members of US doom legends Buried at Sea and of L.A. black/death heathens Lighting Swords of Death) return with their long awaited debut album - the haunting and chameleonic Mutant Flesh, forty minutes of shapeshifting and deviant horror punk/gothic rock soaked in neon, blood, sex, and perversion.
Shrouded in an aura both erotic and extraterrestrial, Mutant Flesh is a modern post-punk juggernaut in which Deth Crux have distilled the most tumultuous, unclean, and eclectic aspects of their home town Los Angeles to create a dark punk opera of unparalleled seductiveness and darkness. Theirs is not the Los Angeles we all know. Instead it is a city they have transformed and reimagined through sound with its most dysfunctional and cinematic traits exaggerated and pushed to the forefront, haunted by neon-hungry ghosts and mutated subhuman creatures hiding behind black sunglasses among the surface population, where strange flesh is sold to fulfill unearthly desires. In Mutant Flesh Deth Crux channel the grandiose majesty and gloom of iconic UK goth bands like Bauhaus, Fields of the Nephilim, and Sister of Mercy, with the spooky and feral irreverence of Christian Death, projecting it all against their own personal audio-visual backdrop of decaying urban madness and sinister body horror to yield something truly both unseen and marvelously unsettling and seductive.
Recorded and mixed by famed sound designer Sanford Parker (Leviathan, Wovenhand, Nachtmystium, Voivod etc.) in 2017 at Big Band Sound in Los Angeles, Mutant Flesh features contributions also by saxophone legend Bruce Lamont (Yakuza, Corrections House) and is already slated to become a classic dark goth/horror punk opera of our times.
Deth Crux spawned from the L.A. underground, debuting in 2015 with their now classic Pears of Anguish demo tape, released that year by underground tape label T(R)APE. The demo tape was met with much acclaim, stirring up quite a buzz and going quickly sold out as the band was already being hailed as a rising promise in US deathrock. In the wake of the tape's success the band spent the ensuing months writing new music and then booked studio time with famed sound engineer and fellow Buried at Sea bandmate Sanford Parker to record what would become their shapeshifting and tumultuous debut album Mutant Flesh.
Though their sound is easily recognizable as descending from the gloom and decadence of iconic UK bands like Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, and Fields of the Nephilim, as well as from legendary US deathrock deviants Christian Death, Deth Crux are all but an easy band to pin down, mostly due to their mutating and chameleon-like approach to post-punk, where beauty and ugliness, seduction and perversion, dream and nightmare interchange constantly and construct the foundation of their sound within a framework of profound dualism and ambiguity. What sets the band most apart from their gothic rock contemporaries however is their highly personal and unique aesthetic inspired and influenced by the many and darkest faces of their city of origin, Los Angeles, which the band have meticulously distilled to re-paint their home city upside down and inside out, exaggerating its dystopian traits and turning it into a primal force of inspiration for the music and lyrics. The result is a staggering audio-visual experience where the aforementioned musical influences are set against a backdrop of urban chaos and decadence, glamour, sex, perversion, seduction, death, and body horror, and then stirred into a blood-soaked and hallucinating rock and roll horror story about deviated and once-human beings aimlessly and erratically populating and roaming a damned neon hellscape.
Mutant Flesh has been featured abundantly leading up to its release with tracks premiered by Indy Metal Vault, Last Rites, and No Clean Singing, and with the full album finally premiered in full this week by CVLT Nation.
Mutant Flesh is set to be released on December 7 2018 on tape and vinyl in the US by Sentient Ruin, on vinyl in the EU by legendary Italian crust punk label Agipunk's goth subsidiary Legion of the Damned, and on CD by Italian dark metal label Aural Music.
Long live the Mutant Flesh!