Originally written by Ian Chainey
Prostitute Disfigurement is a recently-resurrected brutal death metal band releasing its fifth album, From Crotch to Crown, on Willowtip. And, really, that’s enough data to formulate your best guess regarding your reaction. Wanna test it?
Accurate, I bet.
But, hey, who are we to refuse an opportunity to permanently dot your eyes with too much overwrought text? Better get some hangers then, because it’s time to unpack. Here are three takeaways:
1. Dutch death metallers are uniquely awful at naming things. True, for every iconic and deservedly long-lasting nom de blargh (Asphyx) there are a billion bad ones (Arsebreed, Gorefest, and on and on). Now, that ratio isn’t incomparable to the rest of the metal world. It just seems as if these wince-inducing sobriquets belong, more often than not, to the Netherlands’ widdly cream, the best and brightest of the squee n’ molo. So, operating under the dodgy supposition that talented and artistic people tend to make strong creative choices, the name-fails are either nationwide in-jokes or the product of scenes utterly lacking self-awareness. Brutal death in particular? Well, let’s unfairly deduce the latter. Obligatory analogy: If an office got a workplace dog, NLBDM would be the ace IT guy submitting a folded scrap of paper reading, “Slobbersphincter.” Then, they’d sit in HR’s cube, confused, wondering why their vote wasn’t counted. Or, they’d ring the holy hell out of a cowbell as if they were at a speedskating rink. Whichever.
That said, considering PD’s BDM proclivities, why page through Keats for a string of pearls if they can cut to the chase with a two-word barometer in the MadLibs of their elders? Yeah, the violence against women angle is off-putting. (It is. A certain song title is regrettable, too. This is a different discussion and one a metal site is ill-equipped to properly mediate. You didn’t come here for a sheltered white man to wag his finger at other white men. Be that as it may, if you’re inclined, the comments are open for experiments in futility.) However, writing bands off solely because of a crap name? That’s like saying something is sucky because it’s in a style you despise. Who would do tha-oh.
2. Heads up: Brutal death metal is brutal death metal. Freshness is a virtue, though not required. Catering to non-BDM fans isn’t a universally-held utopian end-goal. When the buzzy monoculture — and people who seriously use the word “monoculture” — was rightly fried by the Net’s inexhaustible-archive bug-zapper, we all got spoiled. At that sharp left in human history, music artists and entities finally had to fight for attention on a playing field flatter than armadillos following a scrum against bulldozers. Distilled to a single line marketer’s nightmare, the consumer got used to getting everything their way. Result: Oddball outfits earned brownie points for unique diversification, creating cynical niches through Mendelian inheritance. What were once pillars are now speedbumps. That means whole-genre haters think they’re only an album away from uncovering “their one” since, Yo, anything is possible. If you can please my needs, why bother tuning old models? It reads right, but it’s kind of awful uncaged. It’s a morass of “open-minded” hollow shells damning styles for skipping elements the practitioners had zero intention of incorporating in the first place. Somehow, that ideology stuck: Weeks of the upcoming release calendars are crammed with _________ cuts for fans who hate _________. Worse, these soon-to-be-shucked clams are held up as shining ideals. Look, you could be this if you tried harder to engage my taste today.
Case in point, Prostitute Disfigurement receives a lot of flak for working within recognizable brutal death metal boundaries, despite their standing as above-average practitioners. Yuck. Slam the style, not the players. That brings us to:
3. Willowtip devotees will get down with Crown until the next air guitar update is released. This newest full-length takes those flight-of-the-Beelzebub, quick-picked, Deicide-ian rhythms of staccato evisceration and beefs up the br00fulness to pass modern inspection. Take note, though: Smells-like-core, all-open chugs? Nope. Plates of bree offered by piggy waiters? Nope. Tech-inclined shreddery featuring a Euro-ized Floridan flavor? Yep. Old in its newness. Along the way, there are Malignancy pinch-mes; a-melodic, high-degree-of-difficulty solos aplenty; and deep, double-tracked autopsy table reveries. PD doesn’t do it distinctly, it just does it well enough, rising right below the high-water mark of their pre-breakup bruiser Descendants of Depravity (Left in Grisly Fashion, if ya nasty). The new dudes fill the shoes of the old, sprinkling in their own approaches to BDM syncopation, athletic precision, and a Kyrie Irving handle on death metal theory. Par for the course if you could actually shoot par for the course: You’ll collar the serial murder suspect wielding the greatest spine-snapping gravity blast, drop it on a lift-day playlist, and let it bash you around until it tires out.
Basically, if you enjoy BDM on Willowtip and can stomach a rotten moniker, you’ll enjoy Crown for a week. (Maybe longer depending on your metabolism or the intensity of your instrument practice regimen, naturally.) If you don’t, you won’t. Suppose we should’ve said that at the top.
