What makes The Black Dahlia Murder the cream of metal’s crop is that, while never abandoning their face-ripping ways, they refuse to just spin their wheels from album to album. The dudes started out good, and they keep getting better. No amount of flowery verbiage myself could back that statement up more than just one listen to Ritual will. Because just one listen is all The Black Dahlia Murder needs to grab you by the throat, beat you senseless, and leave you lying on the pavement like some ninety-pound moron who just picked a fight with Georges St-Pierre. But, being the sadistic little fuck you are, you’re gonna pop right back up and listen again, aren’t you? Damn right you are, because this is hands down one of the most vicious slabs of metal we’ll get this year.

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It’s a testament to the dedication (and depravity) of all those involved that a band like Macabre can live through a quarter century of fads, fashions and flat-out shitty bands, yet still manage to continually outdo themselves at their own game. Much like those who brought us all those wonderfully campy and gory slasher flicks in the 80’s, Macabre have built their career on the backs of serial killers, knife wielding maniacs and blood-thirsty bastards from all walks of life. They don’t call it ‘murder metal’ for nothing, after all.

The band’s newest opus, and first proper full-length since 2003’s Murder Metal, is as off-the-wall as anything they’ve produced to date. Every bit the raucous, gore-grind slab of still-quivering meat fans have come to expect from the band, Grim Scary Tales is another one in the win column for this now legendary trio. Thankfully, we live in a society that provides no shortage of lyrical fodder for a band that specialized in penning odes to history’s most beloved killers and this particular tome is chock-full of favorites. Like a kick-ass pack of serial killer trading cards (featuring arsenic-laced bubblegum!), Grim Scary Tales digs deep into the annals of true crime history for inspiration. Illustrious characters like Lizzy Borden, Vlad Tepes and Elizabeth Bathory, to name a few, are brought to life like never before on this album.

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