After a little under a year since their last barrage, Denata returned with yet another EP of violence and hate, and at three EPs over the course of three years, I'm hoping this means they'll become a yearly tradition for me. As you'd expect, the music is savage and direct, the playing rough and immediate, and songwriting akin to the band repeatedly punching you in the gut. The biggest difference here is that they've shed a lot of the punky energy from previous releases and even ditched most of the proper thrash leanings here, instead invoking the earliest days of Abscess and demo-era Necrophagia, meaning this is the grittiest and most brutal of their recent releases. However you may put it, Burn the Cross is just another all too brief release of Denata's raw, unapologetically old-school death metal that strives to stand out among its predecessors while paying bloody homage to its ancestors. Reliable as always.
