MOTHER OF ALL- Global Parasitic Leviathan

RELEASE YEAR: 2024

BAND URL: https://motherofallofficial.bandcamp.com/

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy s@#t we don’t need…We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off – Tyler Durden in “Fight Club”

There is a sense that everything that could possibly be heard in thrash metal has been heard. From its beginnings with Metallica’s No Life ‘Til Leather¹⁹⁸² demo, with Dave Mustaine almost universally regarded as the father of the genre even by his peers, through the subsequent rise of the big four: Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica and Slayer, and their many derivatives such as Annihilator, Kreator, Overkill and Testament (to say nothing of Pantera), the almost universal first death of thrash by the alternative grunge nu metal trifecta, and, finally, the XXI Century rebirth represented by the likes of Evile, Havok and Warbringer, brought it to completion. However, one Danish man turned a quartet named Mother Of All (MoA) may yet prove that thrash is not a completely exhausted genre, smartly mixing it with some melodic death metal and metalcore, if the very good Global Parasitic Leviathan²⁰²⁴ independently released on April 12th, is any indication.

I wrote that Mother Of All started as a one-man band but that’s not exactly true. The band had actually been founded (2013) and had persisted as a trio of Jens Martin Haumann (drums, vocals), Jardén Schlesinger (guitars-2017) and Rasmus Christensen (bass-2017) through the two independent EPs, Suppression²⁰¹⁴ and Secular Assault²⁰¹⁷, however, by the time of the first full length, Age Of The Solipsist²⁰²¹, it was reduced to a one man project of Haumann (howbeit, with the current guitarist Frederik Øgaard Jensen as a session guitarist and the great Steve DiGiorgio <ex-Death, ex-Testament etc.> laying down bass). For the recording of this, the 2nd full length, Jensen (2014-guitars), Henrik Rangstrup (2024-guitars) and Michael Møller (2024-bass), joined in as full members making MoA a quartet it is today.

Although Haumann had always been thrash-oriented, the first three records were more progressive metal in a sense that they have incorporated thrash as one of the components but hardly the main one. Accordingly, the very good Suppression²⁰¹⁴ EP recalls Metallica’s Load¹⁹⁹⁶ but is more twisted like Voivod, whereas the excellent, and to date, the best recording, Secular Assault²⁰¹⁶ EP, evoked latter Death and early Soilwork (the title track somehow nodding forward to Global Parasitic Leviathan²⁰²⁴ in the same way Megadeth’s “The Skull Beneath The Skin” <1985> relates to “Holy Wars…Punishment Due” <1990>), while riding on some serious black metal and Testament-al thrash, practically striding confidently 3 genres. The one-man machine album and Mother Of All’s debut full length, the good but too unfocused to be great, Age Of The Solipsist²⁰²¹ (on Black Lion Records), took that progressive genre-melding tendency a bit further and darker borrowing from Canadians Martyr stylings while introducing the Voivod influence (that will be so essential on the 2nd full length) and clearly had elements of long forgotten Withered from their debut (Memento Mori²⁰⁰⁵), which also anticipated the 2nd album, and, finally, early Omnium Gatherum and early Daylight Dies were mixed with early Revocation and 90s Megadeth stylings, again, foreshadowing the 2nd long play.

With a title alluding to the multinational corporate takeover of the world governments, come lyrics more focused on both our predicament in that, de facto, new world order, with “Mars the God of War” taking “corporate form …wars without states” fought using private armies “fighting not for flags, but paid by the states” (Corporate Warfare Leviathan) but also the realization that, as consumers, we have only…ourselves to blame! Indeed, was it not our “exploitative un-empathic interaction…as suffering became an abstraction” and “self interest – the engine of progress” (Cosmic Darkness) the religions of old replaced by the religion of self-interest, with the Global Parasitic Leviathan the social contract of our time (bandcamp Haumann’s declaration)? Was it not our western love affair with the neoliberal Reaganomics that subsidized tax-free “preaching of the markets dream, while the lobby locked in the monopoly” promoting “merchants of empty dreams in societies of pyramid schemes” skilled in coaching to cannibalize while “industry” (in truth, collective of finance, real estate and monopolies) is subsidized, “selling markets as naturalized” while “long since they’ve been feudalized” as “fake finance owns our homes, tech lords our minds” (Merchants Of Self-Loathing)? Haumann & Co. even seem to wax conspiracy theoretical regading AIDS/HIV and possibly even COVID-19 with “white robes for PR & fame” which can’t “hide the shame of tainting science with power games and private aims” as “doctors sell disease, science fills the need of hungry coffins with holes to feed”, “funding…the determining axiom of the fields” (Monuments), which must needs be connected to secretive mandarin banking control” and “cartels united through coal and steel” which “crush rights without appeal” (Debt Crush). So “don’t fixate on hope”, and not because we are outnumbered (we aren’t!) but because “Global Parasitic Leviathan” has tentacles in every heart…the monument to our inner cosmic darkness…pillars of opaque power rising beyond the reach of the earthbound” while self-evident is your dark heart” (a possible sarcastic allusion to the American Declaration Of Independence) as “fearful greed lives in you and me, so give in” and “end your days in the pyramid’s hierarchy”, however, “just resist” (Pillars), all of which inspired the prologous reference to my personal favorite motion picture, David Fincher’s “Fight Club” for which Global Parasitic Leviathan²⁰²⁴ could be the soundrack, especially with mankind overwhelmingly living a self-fulfilling prophecy where “the light, it hurts my eyes, disrupts my selfish vision” (for proof of that just remember whom the Americans have just elected their new President and that by a landslide!) as “I dig up walls to guard my tired well-groomed mind” so don’t make me have to think” whereby “we live our lives as if it was the end of history, resigning to a hollow selfish dream resulting in the end of history” (Hypocrisy: Weaponized) unaware that “the universe observes how the stars we are made from already faded” (The Stars Already Faded).

As thrash metal (which dominates the record) has always been the perfect medium through which to express socio-political commentary (see Megadeth, Metallica, Testament or Kreator), the music fits Haumann’s poetry like a glove. Two of the 8th tracks (which happen to back-to-back end the album) are musically and lyrically perfect in that expression: “Monuments” – the Megadeth-ian melodic technical riffs-driven verses driving the Slayer-ic chorus with Trivium-ish melodic transtion – and the insanely catchy hardcorish thrash melodeath of “Pillars”, highly reminiscent of the Christian metalcorer’s War Of Ages’ excellent debut eponymous²⁰⁰⁵, but the D.R.I. crossover cooked on Ascendancy²⁰⁰⁵ Trivium “Hypocrisy: Weaponized” comes really close to perfection, with none of the remaining tracks worthy of less than a 5/6 point score, as musical references pour out from almost every track, a Prove You Wrong¹⁹⁹¹ Prong-y intro here (Debt Crush), a Dreaming Neon Black¹⁹⁹⁹ Nevermore-ic intro there while stylistically and lyrically highly evocative of Death’s “Vacant Planets” (The Stars Already Faded), Metallica’s “Call Of Cthulhu” melodic riffs stylistically driven by Determination²⁰⁰¹ God Forbid somewhere else (Merchants Of Self-Loathing), or the album’s beginning and ending melody recalling Unearth’s “March Of The Mutes” with the the seemingly ubiquitous technicality and feel of Canadians Martyr, early Revocation and Voivod-ic craziness – all of it fairly familiar but none of it obnoxiously so, but, overall, much better put together than anything Mother Of All conceived before, with the notable exception of the near-perfect Secular Assault²⁰¹⁷ EP, all of which makes for a compelling, if not a groundbreaking album, with an 11 year old band barely on their 2nd full length. Now, imagine what could the fusion of it and the aforementioned 2nd EP yield on album number three!