Swollen Members have battled some mighty big demons over the past three or four years, including rapper Shane ?Madchild? Bunting overcoming a serious addiction to OxyContin that left him broke and broken. As 2011's Dagger Mouth and Madchild's subsequent solo effort Dope Sick proved, victory is at hand. Yet on Beautiful Death Machine the battle goes on, the Vancouver rap troupe sticking to its trademark horror movie soundtrack-textured rap. Stacked against recent work, Beautiful Death Machine doesn't bring much new to the table. However, Bunting, Kiley ?Prevail? Hendricks and producer Rob The Viking show a bloodthirsty intensity here. Lyrically, Beautiful Death Machine sees Swollen Members angry, hungry and swinging at everything in sight: Monsters, fakers and haters. Beautiful Death Machine is far from a hearse containing a dead rap group's corpses on a slow roll to the graveyard. It's a sinister, fear-defying monster truck crushing everything in its path on its way out of hell.(by François Marchand)