96 Bitter Beings, or any Deron Miller-related project honestly, brings about the kind of situation (Or is it event???) where the moment they release something new or we’re fortunate enough to get some sort of advance music across our digital desk we drop everything in order to fully consume. Which was definitely the case when Return To Hellview, the new Camp Kill Yourself re-imagining/re-structuring/re-whatevering, arrived earlier this week.
We were living our best record store life back when CKY’s Vol. 1 was doing the rounds in the early 00’s with a co-worker regularly blasting the record across a full store on any given busy Saturday afternoon as the store manager would frantically run to the stereo to skip “My Promiscuous Daughter” before the opening chorus (“I caught my daughter giving head to my brother”) corrupted all the young minds accompanying the weekend Boston tourists within the confines of the store. Regardless of this regular spectacle, we’ve been hooked ever since so when Deron Miller announced that he was returning again to a world he helped create (A successful crowdfunding campaign in 2018 previously brought Camp Pain back to life with a limited release), we were sold.
What Deron Miller has done with Return To Hellview is essentially craft the ultimate CKY record culling tracks mostly from 2002’s Infiltrate-Destroy-Rebuild and 2005’s An Answer Can Be Found (With B-side “Shippensburg” closing out the new collection) and what? Re-recording his favorites? Taking the apparent best tracks off those records? Who cares! All we know is that this works especially with the brilliant sequencing that comes into play quite often here mixing and matching those two records to make something wholly new yet not. Bigger and badder than ever before, I-D-R‘s “Flesh Into Gear” starts it all off and just sounds massive when compared to the original which is the case with what’s to follow like “Sink into the Underground” (Which actually does follow “Flesh…” on I-D-R) that sounds more vibrant thanks in part to the extra effort from 96BB bandmates Tuomos Vuorio and Matthew Janaitis.
“Shock And Terror” is kind of a new anthem with the way Miller belts out the chorus and “Inhuman Creation Station”, with its’ hypnotic riffage, is ten times the mesmerizing beastie it previously was. “Suddenly Tragic” flows into “The Way You Lived” just as it originally did on An Answer Can Be Found but works even better deeper in Return To Hellview with “Dressed In Decay” completing the trinity in truly God-tier fashion. “Tripped Manic State” is just brutal and not in this ridiculously heavy way but more the fact at how vicious it is with each note a letter of intent propelled at listeners’ awaiting earholes in such an unholy manner. So yeah, it kind of is that kind of heavy too. Previously intended for Vol.2, “Shippensburg” eventually arrived as a B-side on 2011’s B-Sides & Rarities compilation from CKY and here it makes a fitting closer with the bustling bombast that’s ever present.
Return To Hellview arrives on June 14th through Nuclear Blast. You can get yer pre-save on now across all your most favorites DSP’s when you head here. For more from 96 Bitter Beings, follow them across the interwebs by clicking here, here, or here.