Review Summary: Living Weapon’s Death in the Family is pure suffocation: crushing low end, filthy vocals, chaotic arrangements, and enough emotional weight to make the whole thing feel inherited.
What the *** is this?
Death in the Family might be the single most oppressive metalcore record I’ve heard in years. The bass-heavy production makes the entire thing feel suffocating, and Living Weapon rarely lets up. It beats you to death, piques your interest, and then beats you to death again.
But this isn’t heaviness for heaviness’ sake. There are progressive flourishes, subtle electronic textures buried beneath the chaos, and drumming that occasionally feels like it wandered in from a Discordance Axis or Nasum record. Parthenogenisis provides the closest thing to a breather, shifting into an almost jazzy, bass-forward instrumental before throwing you back into the violence.
The easiest shorthand I can give you is this: Living Weapon sound like END and Frontierer had a baby. Tracks like The Leaving Process and especially In Loving Memory combine filthy breakdowns and completely ***ed-up blast beats with the kind of instability that makes the record feel like it could fly apart at any second.
The vocals are just as nasty. They stay mostly within the same register, with an almost Matt McDougal-like delivery, but never become grating. Instead, they act like another instrument of destruction.
Emotionally, it feels like Living Weapon are carrying the weight of their entire family tree’s anger on this LP. You feel that weight without needing to understand a single lyric.
My only real criticism is that all of this becomes exhausting. The musicianship and arrangements are A+, but this isn't something I’d casually throw on to jam. It’s a mood record. You put it on when you specifically want to be pummeled into submission.
There’s nothing accessible about Death in the Family, and I don’t think Living Weapon give a ***. If you need an entry point, Qui Transtulit Sustinet is probably the closest you’ll get simply because it’s the most metalcore-forward track here.
If you want something that will pummel you into submission, this is for you. If you want something whose emotional weight hits before the lyrics do, this is for you.
