Artist: Pillagery / Goatscrote
Country: Canada
Label: WolfKult Religion
Formats: Split Tape
Year: 2025
With names like Pillagery and Goatscrote and a cover featuring goat heads and bullet belts, you don’t need to have an awful lot of imagination to envision what the music might sound like. You guessed it, this split is perfect fodder for those with the finer taste in Extreme Metal: Bestial Black Death Metal from the country of arguably the biggest band in genre, Canada. Let’s see if these guys make Blasphemy proud!
Pillagery follows up their first demo with six songs totalling a little over 14 minutes. With buzzing guitars and discomforting feedback, the band blasts through their allotted time with little aim to bring any sense of subtlety. FelixS previously described them as a more Black Metal oriented version of Blasphemy and Proclamation with strong hints of Archgoat, and that comparison is still very much true. Especially the drums are more in the vein of Beherit, Sadomator and Archgoat than your typical Death Metal band, and the music has the same minimal intent. The band has a great sense for groove and pulls the slower intro to ‘Possessed By Infestation’ just as well as the rest of the more savage material.
With a Spacey intro in the vein of a Sci-Fi TV show, Goatscrote almost sets you on a wrong foot. But once ‘Crown Of Horns’ starts it’s obvious we haven’t accidentally skipped to a new Blood Incantation song. While the Pillagery side had a sharper guitar sound pushing it into old school Black Metal directions, Goatscrote uses a much chunkier sound with gurgling sink vocals, whammy solos and grinding chaos. Much closer to Beherit, Blasphemy, Teitanblood, Sadomator, Proclamation and the likes, the one thing that sets them apart is a somewhat cleaner guitar sound in some of the leads. Like their Split counterparts, it’s not all relentless blunt force. Yes, most of it is, but the grooving section of aforementioned track even has a subtle solo to offset the guitar heaviness and mandatory church bells. While the band is clearly more leaning towards the Death part of Bestial Black/Death Metal, there are certainly some riffs that have a much stronger Black Metal connotation, such as in ‘Fist-fucking Your Face’.
With a strong nod to Blasphemy, Sadomator, Proclamation and Beherit, both sides of the tape approach their Canadian Black/Death Metal brutality slightly differently. Still, it’s the frenzied, violent and chaotic values that both Pillagery and Goatscrote embrace, and what unifies them on a highly entertaining (but of course absolutely not original) split.
