Whitechapel

Whitechapel (Metal Blade)

Piano/synth and Ratt riff intro to a guttural, machine-gun roar (“Make It Bleed”), tribal swagger (“I, Dementia”), and Eastern end accents (“Dead Silence”). The fourth full-length from this Knoxville, Tenn., death metal sextet expands detailing from previous bruiser A New Era of Corruption. Looser, less right-angle technical, Whitechapel deals bone-breakers like “Section 8,” one-upped by the succeeding “Faces” (“erase your words and die”), before blaring blindly toward the end, though the bleeding never stops. ***

This article appears in August 10 • 2012.

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San Francisco native Raoul Hernandez crossed the border into Texas on July 2, 1992, and began writing about music for the Chronicle that fall, debuting with an album review of Keith Richards’ Main Offender. By virtue of local show previews – first “Recommendeds,” now calendar picks – his writing’s appeared in almost every issue since 1993.