Lock Up – Brethren Of The Pentagram, 4CD Edition

Lock Up – Brethren Of The Pentagram, 4CD Edition
Dissonance
Release date: 29/05/26
Words: Jon Deaux
7.5/10
Generous enough to acknowledge genuine greatness, stingy enough to remind you that three and a half hours of grindcore across four discs is also, medically speaking, a cry for help

Somewhere in the squalid crossroads of extreme metal’s family tree – a Venn diagram that appears to resemble a car wreck involving several cars, all of them filled with band equipment – Lock Up have always managed to stake their claim at the most crowded and glorious crossroads. Shane Embury, the man whose bass lines have fuelled approximately forty percent of all things good in grindcore, came to realize in the late 90’s that Napalm Death was not quite enough outlet for his destructive tendencies. Well, okay. Some men enjoy philately.

It would seem that he got together and formed something akin to a fever dream scrawled on the back of a Decibel magazine advertisement: Jesse Pintado – the other half of the apocalyptic two-guitar assault in Napalm Death and co-conspirator in the Terrorizer opus World Downfall, arguably the most important thirty-two minutes in the history of grindcore – and Nick Barker, a man so technically sadistic he’d spent years beating away on the skins in both Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir, which either makes him a genius or a man with no discernible taste in bands. And then, to round out the membership list, Peter Tägtgren. Yes, that Peter Tägtgren. Hypocrisy. PAIN. The man who’s produced half of Sweden’s extreme metal output from a studio which exists in a snow-covered bunker somewhere north of sanity.

The end result was ‘Pleasures Pave Sewers’, and it arrived in 1999 sounding exactly as apocalyptic as that title promises. Borrowing their influences from the likes of Dark Angel, Terrorizer, and Possessed – the Holy Trinity of bands your parents still don’t want to admit you listen to – it sounded like a skip lorry crashed into a glass storefront. Noisy, functional, and with no time for your weekend plans. CD1 rehashes the debut with faithful accuracy, i.e., it still sounds like being aggressively lectured by a pair of noisy machinery.

With the second album, ‘Hate Breeds Suffering’, it appears that Tägtgren realized he had other apocalypses to attend to and handed over the reins to Tomas Lindberg. And if you don’t already have a clue what Tomas Lindberg contributed to At the Gates and Disfear, then quite honestly, this box set isn’t for you, and you should probably start somewhere a little more friendly, like mid-period Metallica, and work your way backwards towards civilization.

With Lindberg on board, it appears that the entire operation has been honed to a slightly leaner and slightly hateful point. ‘Castrate The Wreckage’. ‘Dead Seas Scroll Deception’. ‘High Tide In A Sea Of Blood’. Lock Up’s track title department is working overtime on the philosophy of life, death, and all that jazz.

The live tracks that make up the bonus material would be worth trading a kidney for if you missed them the first time around.

Nine years separated the making of albums two and three. Within that span of time, Jesse Pintado died in 2006 from liver failure at the ripe old age of thirty-nine. This is one of the more sad losses in the history of extreme metal worldwide. This was a man with a level of instinctive genius on the axe that was never really treated with the respect that his playing deserved. He is missed throughout ‘Necropolis Transparent’ in a manner that the music does not quite successfully cope with but does try to do so. He is replaced by Anton Reisenegger from the Chilean band Pentagram and also Brujeria, a band that appears to be everyone that Embury has ever met in a green room somewhere. He does all right on CD3, which is another way of saying that he does not embarrass himself in a role such as this, and that is not quite so easy a task as you might think.

‘Necropolis Transparent’ is the Lock Up album with the most tracks, a total of twenty-two with the bonus tracks included, and the record is bursting at the seams with the hubris of a band that had been holding their ideas for nearly a decade, and perhaps half of that could have been culled during that process. There is a cover of Terrorizer’s ‘The Ritual’ with Pintado on guitar, and that is either the ultimate tribute or the kind of thing that causes a man to put down whatever he is drinking and say to himself in a dazed manner, “What are these guys doing?” It is both. Obviously, it is both.

CD4, the live record from Japan, has been out there before, but only in their own country, and that means that a big part of the Lock Up fanbase has spent the last two decades trying to track this one down on eBay with suspiciously high shipping estimates. Twenty tracks from a land that’s always known, quite rightly, that extreme metal must be played to an audience that actually turns up and pays attention to it. It sounds like it’s been made quite rightly as savage as hell, too. Barker’s drumming on this live record is one of the more unpleasant sensory experiences that don’t require a prescription to obtain.

There’s a few new interviews with Embury, Barker, and Reisenegger by writer Darren Sadler in there, and some archival stuff that includes photographs of all of these guys when they looked a hell of a lot younger and a hell of a lot more furious about things, and that’s the kind of thing that really makes a difference between a box set and a cash-in re-release, and it’s nice to see this one done well.

It’s also a tribute to Tomas Lindberg, who died in September 2025, aged fifty-two, which is just a hell of a young age and something that the metal underground had just a little too much experience with in recent years. His work on the “Hate Breeds Suffering” album was one of the most dedicated vocal performances in the genre.

This is four discs of intense grindcore from a band that had absolutely no right to be this good, given the number of bands that everyone in the band was a member of. The bonus tracks make it worth it for existing fans, and the breadth of the track selection makes it a good introduction for the brave newcomer who dares to start here. It’s loud, it’s relentless, it’s occasionally exhausting, and it’s frequently brilliant. This may as well be the Lock Up mission statement and always has been. You already know if this is for you. If you’re reading this far, it is.

DISC ONE

Pleasures Pave Sewers

1.  After Life In Purgatory

2.  Submission

3.  Triple Six Suck Angels

4.  Delirium

5.  Pretenders Of The Throne

6.  Slow Bleed Gorgon / Pleasures Pave Sewers

7.  Ego Pawn

8.  The Dreams Are Sacrificed

9.  Tragic Faith

10.  Darkness Of Ignorance

11.  Salvation Thru’ Destruction

12.  Leech Eclipse

13.  Fever Landscapes

DISC TWO

Hate Breeds Suffering
1.  Feeding On The Opiate

2.  Castrate The Wreckage

3.  Detestation

4.  Retrogression

5.  Slaughterous Ways

6.  Dead Seas Scroll Deception

7.  Hate Breeds Suffering

8.  Catharsis

9.  The Jesus Virus

10.  Broken World

11.  Horns Of Venus

12.  High Tide In A Sea Of Blood

13.  Cascade Leviathan

14.  Fake Somebody / Real Nobody

15.  The Sixth Extinction

16.  Satan’s Generation*

17.  The Dreams Are Sacrificed (live)*

18.  Storm of Stress (live)*

DISC THREE

Necropolis Transparent
1.  Brethren Of The Pentagram

2.  Accelerated Mutation

3.  The Embodiment Of Paradox And Chaos

4.   Necropolis Transparent

5.  Parasite Drama

6.  Anvil Of Flesh

7.  Rage Incarnate Reborn

8.  Unseen Enemy

9.  Stygian Reverberations

10.  Life Of Devastation

11.  Roar Of A Thousand Throats

12.  Infiltrate And Destroy

13.  Discharge The Fear

14.  Vomiting Evil

15.  Stigmartyr

16.  Through The Eyes Of My Shadow Self

17.  Tartarus

18. After Life In Purgatory (Version 2011)*

19.  Feeding On The Opiate (Version 2011)*

20.  Thus The Beast Decapitated*

21.  The Embodiment of Paradox And Chaos (demo)*

22.  Infinite In Its Nothingness*

DISC FOUR

(Play Fast or Die) – Live in Japan

1.  Feeding On The Opiate

2.  Castrate The Wreckage

3.  Violent Reprisal

4.  Detestation

5.  After Life In Purgatory

6.  Triple Six Suck Angels

7.  Slaughterous Ways

8.  Submission

9.  Hate Breeds Suffering

10.  The Dreams Are Sacrificed

11.  Leech Eclipse

12.  Broken World

13.  Delirium

14.  The Jesus Virus

15.  Horns of Venus

16.  Tragic Faith

17.  Slow Bleed Gorgon

18.  Pleasures Pave Sewers

19.  Fake Somebody / Real Nobody

20.  Cascade Leviathan

*bonus tracks

https://www.cherryred.co.uk/lock-up-brethren-of-the-pentagram-4cd-edition

Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Jon Deaux and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.