���Like that rotted canine skull that leers at you from the cover of Gehenna's latest Funeral Embrace, this long-running West Coast band is all jaws, an embodiment of snarling, snapping chaos channeled through a stripped-down, red-raw hardcore assault that remains more than twenty years later one of the most savage sounds in the underground. I've raved about Gehenna for years; long aligned with the "Holy Terror" aesthetic that emerged in the mid-90s, Gehenna are peerless fomenters of violence and lawlessness, their songs anthems to bloodlust and barbarism. Their latest 7", Funeral Embrace delivers five more songs of their signature mix of drug-fueled hardcore punk and rabid black thrash, blackened and hateful, issued on the recently resurrected Dark Empire label now being operated by the teenage son of Integrity front man Dwid (a fact that continues to remind me just how old I'm starting to get).

��� Opening with the blistering narco-worship of "Amphetamine Psychosis", these maniacs whip the air into a blood-frenzy of blackened hardcore, smearing their raw blast with bits of lysergic noise and those PCP-hammered guitar solos, and that seething, violent energy rips through the rest of the EP. Every one of these songs comes snarling out of the speakers at top speed, lashing the barbarism of classic American hardcore to a feverish blur of ultra-violent black thrash a la Nifelheim or Bestial Mockery, and the results are fucking ferocious. There's a bizarre, lupine howling that appears all through the 7", like a pack of wolves lurking behind Gehenna's slavering necroid assault, and the inhuman snarl of front man Mike Cheese echoes madly in a storm of reverb while the band careens through reckless tempo changes that constantly threaten to spiral into total pandemonium. Fucking essential.