Fucklove: Prophet of Death is the debut album from the three-piece Philadelphia powerviolence band Congenital Death. Svbterranean premiered an excellent video of the song “This Is What (American) Dreams Are Made Of” from the album in May, and D.U. is happy to offer a premiere of the album below.
The band name might make the band sound death metal, but instead you’ll hear different ideas ramming into each other across the album’s 15 songs. This includes different vocal hand-offs, varied tempos (but plenty of blast beats), and start-stop, complex, breakneck powerviolence energy. Free-form play with sampling and studio experimentation add fresh texture. These guys (Ryan Fitzpatrick on guitar/vocals, Christian Bach on drums, and John Sepa on bass/vocals) evidently aren’t content to play straightforward music.
Fitzpatrick described the album for D.U. this way: “This thing is lyrically wretched. It’s mostly written around the concept of worldliness, but worldliness approached by a Satan-loving, overly self-aware, wannabe techie in search of endless love and filth and grime. Some stuff is evil, some historic, some internal, and some fantastical.”
The band recorded with Zach Weeks in a rented out studio outside of Salem, MA. “The songs were heavily practiced to keep the recording time short and to go with our gut in the studio,” Fitzpatrick said. “I feel good about the outcome, but the sessions were physically demanding as fuck.
“I’m going for mean-ass fast shit that has some density to it. Something you can thrash and slam some beers to, but also something that you don’t quite get on the first listen. Some of my favorite records—Scum, The Inalienable Dreamless, Bitches Brew—did that to me. I knew that there was something in there that I wasn’t fully appreciating, and that required repeated listening.
Fitzpatrick continued, “Maybe it sounds ambitious, but I don’t want to put my music up against what’s ‘hot in the scene’ right now. I want to put it up against the shit that I think slams the turntable the hardest.”
Fucklove: Prophet of Death comes out on June 14 digitally on Ranch Jams and Hydrogen Man Records. Vinyl from the two labels will be available July 1, and pre-orders are up now. Follow along with Congenital Death on Facebook and Bandcamp. ■
