30th December 2019

Review: “RIP GP” EP from Galactic Pegasus

After a decade together, Andrew Barns, Johnny Ciardullo, Travis Regnier and Cooper Lagace, otherwise known as DJent Metalcore merchants Galactic Pegasus have called it a night. In their time, the Vancouver British Columbia Canada natives have shared stages with Enterprise Earth, AngelMaker and even Suicide Silence to name but a few and this final release promises to be a bitter sweet note. It’s the follow up to May 2018’s “Dysphoria” although the band did unveil a single entitled “Death’s Grip” around 13 months ago.

Originally this piece was simply going to be a note of thanks accompanied by this guitar playthrough video from Andrew Baena for Galactic Pegasus’s final song but… We think that the aforementioned single “Death’s Grip” is an absolute banger (nearly 150k streams on Spotify!) and we’ve enjoyed the collaborations between vocalist Johnny Ciardullo and Baena as they’ve covered songs for the 8 string merchants YouTube channel as well as the bands previous material so we figured we should do this one justice. Opening cut “Rhetoric” kicks into life a flourish of Black Metal blast beats before switching gear into some DJent fueled riffs from Baena and Deathcore vocals from Ciardullo, who has some ridiculous range. He gets those early albums Cradle of Filth Dani Filth high pitched screeches in one breath and then some Chelsea Grin era Alex Kohler depth in the next. It’s nothing short of brewtal. “Spirit Wives” takes a slower dark crawl from the black depths approach as it gradually builds to the knock out punch. The DJent grooves are offset with some downtuned darkness that couple it together with Deathcore like… a spirit wife. Ciardullo at times comes across as being as many as four separate vocalists during the onslaught, his tone shifts once again being absolute genius. Eventually reaching a passage of brutal blast beats with a 82 seconds to go accompanied by some eerie leads, the track is nothing short of a slow headbang to a neck snapping death [8/10]

Track listing