The day Mörti Viventi returned…Valentines Day. There is a lot to love about thrash and The Day the Dead Returned… is a pretty solid offering of metal to the cliched icons of Capitalism.
With a sound that harks back to the warm arrival of metal in the mainstream The Day the Dead Returned… is quite possibly the album your Mum would go mental about and sternly inquire as to your moral position on Satan, or Beelzebub, or that Ozzy Osbourne fellow. It is suffice to say that The Day the Dead Returned… is a dense maw of B-movie paraphernalia and Citharaphilia.
If Fibonacci applied his talent to shredding instead of mathematics thrash might be considered classical. He did not however but his legacy in math has evolved to be encoded into popular culture to quantize the world into a fitting Spirograph of life and death. Fibonacci was a clever guy, but he could not shred to scale. Mörti Viventi, the musical effigy of Adrian “Aidy” J. Heathershaw, can however.
With immaculate song structures every track on the album is high of its own accord and there are no down moments, like a symphony of trampolinists. Attenuating the lo-fi production of what gave the blanket of intense heavy metal such a great feeling the overall production is impeccable to the tropes of thrash metal. Every track is screaming with character behind the hellbent lament of ninja Adrians’ vocals; to note the progressive and instrumental The Arrival of the Anti-God is a 13 minute canvas for the impending reprieve of vocal silence that welcomes Thrash or Die. An ultimatum to spring from the dead and begin again with.
After much repeal from the consumer flock particular about music for musics’ sake Mörti Viventi has made something worthy to be compared to Jeff Waters.
8/10
