The Bollard Bulletin for Aug. 24, 2026

This morning I realized, with no small measure of horror, why death metal bands like the Portland trio Shabti are releasing new albums on cassette in 2026. Haze, Cacophony, and White Light is also available online, but that’ll do you fuck-all when the grid and Web go down for good and you’re wandering the wastelands of the former U.S.A. scrounging for food and hiding from killer AI-guided drones likes the ones whose terrifying debut in Ukraine was reported atop the New York Times today. Boomboxes and Walkmans will still work so long as you have batteries, and magnetic tape encased in plastic is more durable than easily scratched CDs, the portable players of which were never very reliable.

And you’ll want this Shabti album, maybe even need it to bolster your courage and strengthen your resolve to survive and fight the techno-monsters scouring and devouring the planet. Plus, the record rips, packed with airtight tracks displaying stunning musical dexterity and a proclivity to prog-out beyond the well-worn forms of the genre.

You just know the white Christian nationalists currently in control of our government are gonna try to keep rallying the masses with their bullshit post-apocalypse; after all, that’s when their holy book says Jesus will return and the saved will get their permanent heavenly vacation. Songs like the first two tracks here, “Ambrosia and Lamb’s Blood” and “A Weary Creation,” explicitly denounce and discredit those preaching servitude to a sky god whose rewards are bestowed beyond the grave.

“Charlatan!” growler/guitarist Rob Cook calls out on “Ambrosia,” while drummer Ray Capizzo and bassist Brendan Hayter — all of whom have been playing for decades in this and other dark Maine metal bands — make the sonic ground rumble and periodically erupt. “For your obedience you’ll be paid but not ’till after death / Currency of slaves and fools.”

Echoing the famously creepy line from Poltergeist II, Cook declares, “God is in his holy temple” on “A Weary Creation,” the couplet closing with, “rotting in his holy temple,” while the weary people who consider themselves this deity’s creation suffer, “stumbling, listless, gnawing.”

Play these songs if you get tempted in a moment of weakness to join the flock or need to persuade a loved one not to fall for their fantasies. There are other helpful tips here, too.

On the title track, Cook describes the world you can expect if we allow political leaders to keep doing their bloody business as usual. “The stench of exhaust and gasoline, concrete, chain link fence. / A product of a climate that he would anathematize. / Glare on asphalt and car windows, / Desperation of the trapped animals … The only lesson to be learned is that you are only worth what they can take from you.”

“The lands will weep away their verdure as they are wracked with drought,” Cook poetically predicts on “Sojourner.” And on “Rise of the Shabti,” he reports from the rockets headed to Mars with their cargo of billionaires escaping the hellscape they’ve made. “Slumbering in glass tombs, the elite lay in stasis / A place among the stars purchased with grift and gold. … A parasite in search of a new host, / A monoculture encased in metal, / An ark bearing the human animal, / And those on which they satisfy their hunger.”

Enter the Shabti, a post-modern version of the eponymous funerary figures placed in Egyptian tombs to work for the privileged dead in the imagined afterlife. “Spawned of human mind, the legacy of our kind, impervious, enduring,” Cook describes them, adding, “The lizard brain has been lobotomized.”

These new “silicon” Shabti are “all that remain” after the inevitable “schism and violence” always wrought by the “degenerate scion of humanity.”

“Watching and waiting, born in chains, inhuman and of humans,” the Shabti “Stand on the shoulders of giants, pushing their heads under.”

I advise that you stock up on both AA and D batteries so you’ll be able to play this cassette on a variety of portable devices. And maybe print out this review for future reference if we don’t have room, or a printing press, to include it in the next print edition of The Bollard. Good luck and rock onward!

Fiddler Andrew Martelle of The Mallett Brothers Band joins one of said siblings, Will Mallett, for a free waterfront show at Portland Lobster Company (180 Commercial St.) at 6:30 p.m.