UNDYING - This Day All Gods Die LP (Blue w/ purple splat)
1999 debut from Raleigh North Carolina's vegan metal harbingers Undying. The vocals are cataclysmic and instrumentation here is perhaps less streamlined, somewhat more dirty than on the equally riveting full-length that followed soon after. Listening as a fan from outside the band's locality, the intensity and darkness of this material is stylistically appreciable in direct lineage with fellow NC anti-civ enthusiasts Day Of Suffering's crushing Eternal Jihad, which was released a couple years before. After a somber initiation, this extended EP delivers comparable mood, thematic focus PLUS mosh-inducing brutality.
This Day All Gods Die tilted the scales of modern heavy metal infecting hardcore at the turn of the century as few bands in the United States drank as deep from the melodic Swedish death metal virus prior to this. Only Arizona's Suicide Nation seemed to execute their blend as potently as Undying, though a few noble warriors such as Sicarii from Olympia and Memento Mori from Columbus proceeded in the shadows with crustier variations as the bigger names formally christened "metalcore" upon the holy barcode.
Present on this recording are early (and recurring) members of Catharsis, and most everybody here regrouped in 2012-2014 as melodic hardcore band Gut Feeling. I've understood there to also have been some crossover with members of Prayer for Cleansing / future members of Between The Buried And Me, but that's not what happened here. This Day All Gods Die had previously only been released on compact disc, so after a quarter century we finally see a bit of justice with the arrival of this vinyl counterpart alongside their essential Whispered Lies Of Angels LP reissue.
Blue vinyl with cyan blob and violet splatter, limited to 200 copies and sold out elsewhere
"We have no easy solution, and we offer no life-changing doctrine. But our culture's faith must be shattered. This day, all gods die. This is not a call to arms, or a cry for liberation. We don't ask that you live your life for our cause - in anger, sadness, and misery. We only ask that you live in defiance of their gods. Live your life as an enemy to their beliefs. Perhaps you will find that life is happier not spent on your knees before gods which care nothing for the world. Live your life so that each day is spent making the world in which you exist, making the community of life to which you belong a happier. better place. Spit in the face of their gods. Make your life one in which others can see that there exists more than one right way to live. For with each life which turns its back on their beliefs, the gods which make up the foundation of their culture fade further into oblivion."