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Integrity - Palm Sunday
Released by: Magic Bullet Records
Released on: August 21st, 2015.
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The first of a planned series of reissues of Integrity's catalogue from Magic Bullet Records, Palm Sunday is the band's infamous live album recorded in 1992 at Peabody's in their hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. The set includes eight songs off of their debut Those Who Fear Tomorrow album (which had been released a year before this show) and two B-sides (they being Rebirth and Live It Down). At this point in their history, Integrity was made up of vocalist Dwid Hellion, Aaron Melnick and Chris Smith on guitar, Leon Melnick on bass and Dave Araca on drums.
The set, which lasts roughly twenty-eight minutes, starts off with Those Who Fear Tomorrow but before the band kicks in, Hellion is already taunting the audience. The bass line starts off the track proper before the guitars come in and Hellion starts howling, channeling Keith Morris at his most absurd. This is a sludgy track, a grungy sort of hardcore song that's easy to get into but Hellion, even early on in the show, sounds completely unstable.
From here they launch into Judgment Day, but before they do Hellion encourages the crowd to get closer. The song kicks off with some insane howling before it hits a solid mid-tempo groove over which the vocals just get increasingly more absurd. Harder They Fall 'goes out to a pussy ass chump' before it builds, slowly at first, into a pretty fantastic blend of hardcore and what is essentially doom. Wings Tear picks up the pace, it's much faster and more aggressive, breaking things down right from the start and once again seeing Hellion going nuts over top of the band (who at this point are playing really tightly). Dawn Of A New Apocalypse is the longest track on the album at four minutes even, but that includes a bit of banter before hand in which Hellion talks about how the band's shows in Cleveland are the most violent in the world! It's got a guitar intro to it that almost sounds proggy for a few seconds but once they get that out of their system the band once again launch into attack mode. This sees them back in sludgy, doomy mode - it's a slow track but it's heavy and it builds to a pretty berserk finale.
Moving on to the second half of the record, In Contrast Of Sin starts off with Hellion bitching about college kids cutting the mic cord. From there, the bass line comes in thick and heavy, the guitars build to a rhythmic gallop and Hellion's vocals turn into a growl and then a shrieking barrage of indecipherable syllables. It's kind of great, really. Rebirth is introduced as a newer song, with Hellion pausing to introduce new drummer Araca before noting that the song is about the rebirth of Lucifer - so expect something heavy and dark, which is just exactly what this one is.
The set, and obviously the album, come to a close as we move on to Die Hard, but again, Hellion talks about how violent Cleveland is before they actually start playing. This is probably the closest thing to pure, traditional hardcore on the album, we even get some singing along from the audience here. Lundgren Crucifixion has nothing to do with Dolph and everything to do with Jeffrey Lundgren, a man who killed for God. This whole big, beautiful, fucked up mess of a show finishes off with Live It Down, the shortest track on the record at just under two minutes in length. Hellion encourages the crowd to get up and sing along, the band goes off and what starts off as a sludge track explodes into one last blast of noise.
The physical CD release of this album comes with a DVD that includes the entire concert as well as a booklet of liner notes with still photos from the show, but as none of that was included with the materials sent for review it's tough to have much to say about any of that. The album, however, is absolutely killer.
