When I was in junior high, I had a music class wherein I had to “learn” to “play” the recorder. To say that I did poorly at that task was probably a notable understatement, and I distinctly remember my teacher asking me something along the lines of “So… do you understand the basics of music?” (In my defense, in that endeavor and most others in junior high, it wasn’t like I was actually trying. Effort was not always my strong suit, and let’s be honest here, recorders are lame as hell. I would’ve told you then that I couldn’t have cared less about playing the recorder, but based on how little I care about that now, I must concede that time has once again proven Junior High Andy wrong.)
Among the basics of music, of course, are these:
Rhythm: Here we have blastbeats, some d-beats, some thrash beats, all of them fast or fast, only rarely dipping into a relative midtempo that most people would still consider fast. In general, there’s a whole lot of what Mozart would have described as “bashing, crashing, and trashing.” Drummer / guitarist / vocalist Guillaume “Guyome” Béry has been one of the driving forces behind these French gurglers for twenty-plus years now, from their humble beginnings as rawer-than-hell noisemongers to what, when compared to that early cacophony, is a relatively and surprisingly “polished” gory grinding. Slow and steady may win the race, but not here. Grindcore is not for turtles, except for that one German band that’s all about turtles, but I digress…
Harmony: Upon close tonal examination, most of Pulmonologists is written in the key of vomit, although a few tunes start there and modulate up a whole step into burp-flat, and another few are built upon the relatively uncommon Retcholidian mode, which was historically mostly used in Gregorian chants when the monks had maybe had a little too much of the old abbey ale the night before. These riffs are straightforward grinding ones, filled with no extraneous technicality or anything approaching a “frill,” although that’s not to say that they’re necessarily rudimentary or simple. Pulmonary Fibrosis isn’t here to wow you with grand displays of musicianship – they’re here to gross you out.
Timbre: The guitars sound like blown-out speakers; the bass is a distorted wind-breaking beneath, almost entirely in lockstep with the guitars; the drums are live and real, untriggered, a tornadic barrage of bumps and thumps. There are three vocalists credited, and none of them makes a sound that would traditionally be considered “singing,” just a series of wet gargles and gurgles and vomitous exhalations punctuated occasionally with a more traditional snarling death-growl.
Dynamics: Fortissimo. Fortissimo. Fortissimo.
Melody: Good luck finding many. They’re here, though, buried in the sour-stomach putridity. If you listen closely, and dig deep, you’ll find something not unlike a melody worming its way through the gore of “Ruptured Gastro-Duodenal Flexure Erupts Regurgitate” or the relatively intricate (by these standards) tandem of “Extensive Inflammation Of The Umbilicus In Mephitic Suppurated State” and “Gushing Gastric Juices Gurgling Faecal Slime,” a pair that takes up a full seven minutes of Pulmonologists’ 34-minute running time. (For any other goregrind completists, that latter tune features guest vocals from Marek of Purulent Spermcanal.) And then again, if you’re listening closely and digging hard for a melody in songs with titles like those above, then you’re probably thinking a little too deeply about a goregrind record. Sit back and listen; ride the blastbeats, feel the riffs; become one with the sickness; let the nausea become euphoria; gabba gabba we accept you, we accept you, one of us, freak.
I’ve been unduly obsessed with a handful of bands the last year or so, and Pulmonary Fibrosis is one. Like those of the mincecore manglers Agathocles or the raw-grind gods in Unholy Grave, the Pulmonary Fibrosis catalog is extensive, filled with countless splits and demos and the occasional full-length, of which Pulmonologists is the fourth in twenty-four years. The kind folks at Bizarre Leprous have helped late-coming collectors like me with two recent compilations, the wonderfully and accurately titled Nasal Nauseous Vomit Liquid Goregrind History Volume 1 and Volume 2, but even those two, with 140 tracks between them, barely scratch the surface, only encompassing the first six or so years of the band’s output. (Severed fingers crossed for future volumes, for sure.) There’s a lot of Pulmonary Fibrosis material to digest, and conveniently, most of it sounds like various stages of the digestive process.
So yes, Pulmonologists is one sick little puppy, a great gory mess that’s both raw as hell and deceptively well constructed. For whatever all that means, the end result is that I’m solidly sold. This is ugly, gnarly, gross, vile, just like I want my goregrind to be. My junior high music teacher would hate every single second of Pulmonologists at least as much as he hated me honking my way through a free-jazz-inspired take on “Ode To Joy” back in 1990.
And while we’re back on that topic, you wanna know one more good thing about Pulmonologists? There’s not a goddamn recorder anywhere on it.
