UMUR "Deathhammer" is the 7th full-length studio album by Dutch death metal act Asphyx (or the 8th if you count the once unreleased "Embrace the Death (1996)"). The album was released through Century Media Records in February 2012. The band returned to the scene in 2009 with "Death... The Brutal Way" after a nine year recording break. An album that was generally well received by both critics and fans.

"Deathhammer" continues down the by now trademark death/doom metal style that Asphyx have more or less practised from their inception in the late eighties. It´s filthy, raw and brutal in a no frills old school fashion. In Martin van Drunen the band have one of the most distinct sounding growling vocalists on the scene and as always he delivers his tortured growls in a fiercely aggressive fashion. He is of course famous for his membership of both Pestilence and Hail of Bullits, but it´s like Asphyx is where he truly belongs. Or at least where his unique voice sounds most at home.

While the sound production is a bit clearer than usual, "Deathhammer" is still a pretty ugly and raw sounding album. The opening trio of tracks: "Into the Timewastes", "Deathhammer" and "Minefield" will probably blow you head right off and leave your mutilated corpse in the gutter, but they also pretty much tell the story of how "Deathhammer" sounds. The combination of powerful and rather catchy tracks like the first two mentioned and the doomy death metal of the latter mentioned is what we usually expect from Asphyx and this time around is no different. The riffs may be simple and the rhythms too but most of the tracks on the album are damn catchy and there is enough variation between tracks to easily tell them apart.

Besides not having a murky dark sound production like most other releases in the genre, "Deathhammer" features just about every other element that fans of old school death metal crave. The music is well composed and memorable, the musicianship are strong and the sound production powerful. I have no complaints and a 3.5 - 4 star (75%) rating is deserved.

Time Signature Minefield...

Genre: death metal and death-doom

When an album just starts straight on with not intro or anything, then chances are that it will be awesome. That's exactly how the latest effort from Asphyx starts, and awesome is exactly what it is.

The first two songs, "Into the Timewastes" and "Deathhammer" are uptempo agressive old school death metal tracks that crush anything the gets in their way, while the third track on the the album, "Minefield", feature the heavy and doomy riffs that Asphyx are also known for - it's basically seven minutes of top class death-doom.

The rest of the album goes back and forth between primitive old school death metal carnage and death-doom heaviness, and both of these musical aspects of "Deathhammer" will surely massacre they way straight into the heart of any fan of old school death metal. Martin van Drunen of Pestilence and Bolt Thrower fame delivers perhaps his best-ever vocal performance on this album, his anguished growls going perfectly with the overall mood of the album.

"Deathhammer" combines primitive death metal with heavy doom metal and captures the best of the death metal of the 90s, and there should be goodies for fans of Pestilence, Obituary and Bastard Priest, early Paradise Lost as well as My Dying Bride.

Soul Dreamer The first two tracks of this album are bone crushing.. incredible how they can start with such violence...If you think you get a breath pause after that onslaught...forget it! The next song is slower, but still VERY heavy...The tone of this album comes over as more hard and damaging then anything I heard before...The 4th track is speed metal... They just don't have any pause. Only with track 8 they are back to the more sludgey third track. Track 9 is (very hard) death metal. The last track is a bit slower again. The bonus CD has 5 tracks, the first one the German version of the fifth track. The rest continues the first album, so no big differences. Overall this is one of the loudest albums I ever heard. I give it 4/5...it's certainly not perfect, but very intriguing...