Space Parasites – Make Me Evil
Space Parasites – Make Me Evil
Fetzner Death Records
Release date : 05/06/26
Review by: Jon Deaux
7.5/10
Space Parasites make the type of thrash album that makes you think any band that hasn’t done it themselves should be deeply offended at the mere suggestion. Danger Dine could cast an evil spell on your life and make you pay money for the privilege while leaving a glowing review.
Let me tell you something about nostalgia. It is, without exception, a personality disorder masquerading as a taste preference. Every week, another band of adult men in retro-fit blue jeans discovers the secret to changing the world lies in playing 1987 at 75 percent speed, and every week the result falls flat enough to make you wonder whether this is, perhaps, what it means to grow up. The riffs? Check. The patches? Check. The smug, carefully crafted sneer? Check. What’s not here, and what clearly no longer exists, is the portion of the music that actually moves anything.
Space Parasites are not that band. Which is the last thing I expected, and the last thing they deserve.
‘Make Me Evil’ is a thrash-speed metal album that sounds like it was created by artists who enjoy living. Which should come as no shock. That it is a shock is the problem. The riffs pound the body like the impact of a beer crate tossed from a moving truck. Everything about this album is infused with the knowledge that these artists actually feel what they are creating, unlike most metal bands, whose entire process involves pretending to feel things — the equivalent of watching a mime pretend to struggle with being trapped in a box. No one gets fooled. No one is entertained. Everyone leaves unhappy. Space Parasites seem to have left their performances happy, fulfilled, and ready to do it all over again, and this shines through on every single track.
They have been at this game since 2017, and their progression from rough early work through such albums as ‘A Date With Thrash Doctor’ and Raw And Violent’ to the more confident ‘The Spellbound Witch’ tells a story of a band that actually worked to be what it became, rather than one that found an aesthetic and wore it well. The addition of Matti Massaker on second guitar somewhere along the way helped them add depth and punch to their sound, and Make Me Evil represents everything falling into place with the click of something that was always meant to be this.
Daschke and Massaker create a dual guitar system that oscillates between thrashing speed metal and classic heavy metal with precision. The songs flow — in the sense of having a fluid, unconstructed sense of forward momentum that comes from knowing where to put your riffs rather than trying to place them. There are very few metal bands that remember how to make music flow — they create music in the manner of putting boxes in a warehouse: efficiently and correctly, and with no soul. The riff structure of Space Parasites creates music in the form of sentences: the next riff is a logical consequence of the one before it.
“Neckwrecker” is the manifesto behind the whole project, condensed into a single phrase: Neckwrecker. You hear the title. You hear the riff, and you know exactly what kind of music you’re listening to. No ambiguity. No artistic statements. No need for press releases. This music tells you, and only you, exactly what kind of sonic journey it will take you on. The danger in this sort of clarity, and the rarity of finding such clarity in music. In this case, the clarity comes across with an added sense of menace. Danger Dine screams, “Wreck your neck,” and your neck obeys without question.
As mentioned earlier, I mean this as no slight toward her bandmates, who are all great musicians, but Dine herself is the kind of performer that makes whatever she’s in instantly more interesting, the way adding fire makes a room interesting. Her voice is raspy and witchy and entirely distinct. You can pick out her voice within the first bar. The ability to convey the sense of incantation with the same breath she uses to convey complete and utter unhinging, often within the same syllable, without any forewarning whatsoever, sets her apart as a truly gifted artist. On the title track, for example, when she shouts Make Me Evil — Shred You All To Pieces and then proceeds to I Am The Witch, you are certain she means it — as if she has been waiting years to say that over a microphone and has done so for the first time now.
This album plays hard for the entirety of its length. Hellbound gallops with a groove that comes across effortless, though I’m sure it was anything but. Monster festers to beautiful effect, with lyrics that will have you shouting it over a raised drink in a bar while making your companions worry about their safety and sanity. This is the correct choice to make — the song is aware of this and embraces it completely. ‘Bedeviled Witch’ evokes the score of some low-budget VHS horror flick, and the performance of said score with no keys, only axes, and the intention of replacing former with latter is terrifying enough without any of the cliches you might have expected. Tarot features a darkly hypnotic riff structure that will leave you feeling like you’ve been cursed by a woman who studied the art for years, rather than just buying a gift shop witch kit and trying out curses.
The theme of witchcraft running through the album is treated with far more nuance than is usual in metal albums of this nature. There are no Halloween store witches here — the witchcraft on this album is something else entirely, and the lyrics support this theme by creating images of loneliness, insanity, vengeance, and decay, all the while underlaid with riffs that make this credible. When “The passage is open, the conjuration spoken,” you can see exactly why, because Daschke’s riff has already built up enough suspense to make this line meaningful. Music and lyrics are on the same wavelength here — a rarity in itself.
The exception to this otherwise excellent album is ‘How Often,’ the sole ballad here. It has melody, emotional resonance, and all kinds of compositional craft behind it. But for all intents and purposes, it doesn’t belong on this album. It is a perfectly good song that performs badly in context because nothing in here could make this fit into a metal album — not when the album deals with topics like hexes and neck-breaking and blood-slugging. You’ll sit with me, and I’ll let go of genuinely moving lines, and that is precisely the issue. Dine’s voice works perfectly when she is threatening you; when she floats, you wait for the violence that never comes. Like a predator deciding to take a quick snooze in the middle of the hunt, this track fails spiritually.
‘Hostiles’ brings things to another level of discomfort, thanks in large part to its topic. It addresses historical war crimes with graphic, shocking imagery, and does so well because the entire album creates the atmosphere required to pull off such a move. Many bands try this and end up with nothing more than edgy music instead, and there’s a wide gulf between the two, with very few successful attempts at traversing this gulf.
Space Parasites understand the differences, however. This song comes across heavy with the weight that the rest of the album makes room for, and the contrast only helps both elements. Martin Buchwalter produced this album, and the production here is perfect in the way that all good production is perfect — you don’t notice it until you start paying attention to it, after which point you realize all the subtle work he had to do. Powerfully aggressive without ever resorting to clean production. The guitars have bite to them rather than the bitey approximation you hear in the work of people who spent too much time trying to make music heavy rather than real. The bass adds grit rather than providing low notes. Drums hit with directness — you move when they hit, and you cannot avoid doing so.
What Space Parasites have accomplished is the creation of an album that celebrates their love of classic metal without being ashamed of that love, while simultaneously refusing to confuse reverence for creativity. The reverence serves as the beginning, not as the end. They took inspiration and turned it into something entirely new, unique, and coherent. There are so many bands with better equipment, better distribution, and even better critics who have none of the above qualities down cold. There are even more bands that have those qualities and are producing music that will be forgotten as soon as the year ends, which is all they deserve. Space Parasites will be playing shows for as long as they want to, which is precisely what they deserve.
Tracklist
01. Intro
02. Makem me evil
03. Bedeviled Witch
04. Neckwrecker
05. Hellbound
06. Now often
07. Monster
08. Tarot
09. Hostiles
10. Fortress
11. She
Links
https://www.facebook.com/Spaceparasites/
https://spaceparasites.bandcamp.com/album/make-me-evil
