Beats and yelling shorts, 15th July 26

Defiled: Altered StateOut 12th June on Season of Mist The latest effort from this long standing Japanese entity offers flashes of brilliance between long stretches of uninspired number crunching. Similar to Krisiun in the sense that they champion shortform death metal. But where Krisiun – love or hate them – make known their urge to flatten death metal off into a relentless churn of violence in every bar they play, Defiled at this point feel tired, falling back on generic grooves and off-the-shelf riffs. The trimmed down song lengths, once an interesting artistic statement in its own right, now feels like a necessity, as if they are quite literally running out of ideas, forced to let tracks trail off without any real purpose. True to the namesake of the album, ‘Arise’ era Sepultura is the most obvious influence. But none of the flair, daring, or imaginative development can be found here. Thy Killing Hand: Infernal CommandsOut 12th June on EAL Productions Although this Polish entity is…