Bones

This Chicago, IL-based band have some serious cred, consisting as they do of a handful of guys who used to play in true metal kings Usurper. But the tunes here are decidedly less oppressive and more rockin' (for lack of a better term) than anything from Usurper's catalogue. The riff at 1:25 of awesome opener "March of the Dead" sounds like one of those amazingly good riffs you always kind of forget about on side B of Theatre of Pain, while much of the rest of the album is like if Lemmy discovered later-era Entombed and quickly ― real quickly ― thrashed out a demo before sitting back down to smoke another 18 cigarettes, as if nothing ever happened. There's a bit of Celtic Frost in the proceedings as well (no surprise, given there was a lot of Celtic Frost in Usurper's proceedings) and things even get to blast-beat levels of tempo at points (see "Bitch"). Everything about this very cool disc oozes fun, but it's also a dead-serious homage to all things extreme metal.