[Album artwork by fleshflies]
If Conan The Sumerian had pursued The Secret of Acid in lieu of The Riddle of Steel, Conan The Barbarian would have been a very different film. Like, eat shit, Wheel of Pain; so long, time wasted thieving jewels; adios, plans to camouflage yourself as a priest in order to infiltrate Thulsa Doom’s cult. HELLO, thinking the broom handle in your hand is actually the Atlantean Sword; what’s up, heading straight for the Tower of the Serpent and crawling directly into the mouth of Doom’s pet snake before eventually bursting from its bowels in a gore-soaked fume and shouting, “VE ARE ALL ZE ZERPENT, UND ZE ZERPENT’S SKIN MUST BE SHED FOR REBIIIRRRRTHHHH.”
Or…
OR!!!!!
Maybe The Secret of Acid explains the whole of Conan the Destroyer? That would certainly clear up why Bombaata turned out to be a hair farming Wilt flipping Chamberlain carrying a hawk mace.
Production assistant: “We need your measurements for the fur pants you’ll be wearing, sir.”
Wilt Chamberlain: “You know, I once scored 100 points in a single game.”
Conan: “This is some really choice acid.”
Furthermore, it might actually explain what in the holy fuck was going on with this scene:
So, yes, perhaps Learning the Secrets of Acid could be a soundtrack to a Conan film, and based on the album artwork up there……… I would say our Sumerian friend is in for one hell of a journey.
Subotai: “I pray to the four winds… and you?”
Conan: “I am fucking FREAKING OUT, MANNNNNN.”
.
.
Okay, cram it, jack, this is some serious shit we’re dealing with here. (He told himself, not fully realizing that he’s actually typing everything he’s currently thinking. Am I also learning the secrets of acid? Do deaf people in England have British accents?)
Umulamahri, a band whose name is derived from a Morbid Angel tune that’s clearly about Wilt Chamberlain laying waste to the New York Knicks on March 2nd, 1962 (“You’ll perish within the hands / of the storm that means your end” [Euro-step / easy two]), has very suddenly appeared as if from nowhere to deliver a very curious—AND YES, TRIPPY—take on death metal that sounds a bit like modern Gorguts colliding with Chaos Echoes and being slammed through a table by a classic New Standard Elite hearthrob. WHEW, what a sentence.
Just what in the flogged hippie sack does that even mean? Well, Learning the Secrets of Acid is equal parts discordant (very Franch) and dark ambient (i.e. post-industrial), and it’s also exceedingly willing to push the boundaries of brutal death metal right through a dag-blasted concrete wall. The proof is in the pudding, though, right? And so are thousands upon millions of tardigrades. Why can I suddenly see tardigrades? What’s in this Steel reserve 211? BLESSED LORD, IT’S ONLY 9AM.
“Bursting with Life’s True Fruit” is next, and it throws down an ample volume of pep right from the gate, maintaining the previous cut’s dissonance like a 40 year-old HVAC system. It definitely leans harder on the dark ambience, hauling a long stretch of uneasiness to the forefront around 1:30 that would be right at home on a rotting Nostromo that’s just introduced its lethal stowaway. In other words, unless you’re Ripley or Jonesy, you’re kinda fucked. Hey, no one can hear you scream in space, right? (But they will absolutely see that your crapped your VAC suit.)
Track three, “VVVVRMS,” is somehow a, um, ‘cover’ of Mortician’s “Worms,” but where the latter spends its minute of life basically pushing on a pull door, the Umulamahri version gives session drummer Kevin Paradis (Construct of Lethe, Aronious, Infernalivm, and several others) ample opportunity to shuffle and jive around that leveling synth bass. Paradis s a very good drummer—quite active and creative with the fills, and intensely precise with speed. He certainly adds to the ‘mechanized’ feel that permeates the record, but it’s worth noting that, while mechanized, Learning the Secrets of Acid never sounds stamped from some looming appliance.
By contrast, “Orifice Invocation” is much more straightforward with the task of handing the listener their ass via an absolute drubbing:
Again, it’s mechanical without losing touch with the organic sense of having actual humans producing the music in real time. Things go glitchy just before the minute mark, and then it’s right back to punting you through the uprights. Vocalist Doug Moore is impossibly guttural—like if the Chernobyl Elephant’s Foot could sing—and at times he reminds me of the deepest end of Malte Gericke (Necros Christos / Sijjin) or Götz Vogelsang (Deathevokation). By 1:50, shit is just GRINDING with hallucinogenic fury, and then right around 3:11 (“amber is the color of your enerrrrgyyy”) everything suddenly goes quiet for a quick synth-bass breakout. Every song here is quite good at hairpin turns, but “Orifice Invocation” throws down the most intense drubbing, with chief architect Andrew Hawkins (Baring Teeth, Adharcáil) sounding as if he plays the guitar with an extra hidden arm that’s just exploded from his chest.
“Leaked Photo of Heaven” closes out the relatively succinct adventure, and it does so by picking up where “Orifice Invocation” left off: obliterating with mutant force. At 1:15 we get the most obvious nod to slam, and it’s a fittingly ruthless breakdown that slowly crumbles to an even slower and grosser form by the song’s halfway point before FLYING OFF at breakneck speed. Here we also get the closest thing to a guitar solo you could possibly expect, and then the final minute and a half is spent pounding a form of chaos heavy enough to have its own gravitational pull straight up your keister. (I, uh, promise it’s actually more pleasant than that.)
So, is… Is Conan even still in the building? Did he discover The Secret of Acid buried in some long-forgotten crypt? If so, and if he could somehow have access to this wonderfully punishing Umulamahri debut, there’s no telling where he’d be today.
“So, did Conan return the wayward daughter of King Osric to her home. And having consumed massive amounts of Hyborian acid, he and his companions sought mystical gnomes that no one else could see, and they had conversations with boulders in the middle of the night. Many wars and feuds did Conan fight. At least in his mind, as he was actually just sitting in a stream fiddling with his derelict loincloth. In time, he became an acid king by his own hand… And this story shall also be told.”
