Ascended Dead have released Live Apocalypse through Carbonized Records, eight songs recorded at the Canal Club in Richmond on 24 May 2024.
It comes from the American Apocalypse Tour of that year and was taken straight off the soundboard, then mixed and mastered without any attempt to tidy what was played. That is the point of it. This is a band whose reputation rests on speed and on the sense that the thing could come apart at any moment, and a studio record flattens exactly that.
The other thing the recording documents is a return to the Marshall amplifier sound they used at the start, now underneath the more technical writing of the two studio albums. Ungodly Death, Bestial Vengeance, Nexus Of The Black Flame, Fissure Of Chaos and Ensnared For Eternity are among the eight.
The band formed in Southern California in 2011 with a clear model in mind: the primitive violence of early Possessed, Necrovore and Venom, played without the intervening thirty years of refinement. They have not moved far from it.