Heteropsy – Embalming Review

Mankind has a great history of discovering how two great tastes taste great together. From the Reese’s Cup to putting some really good slaw on a pulled pork sandwich, we know the value of adding a little depth to flavor by combining a couple dishes that might not seem like they go together on paper. But nothing fun ever gets discovered by sticking with what seems right on paper.

By combining really grimy doom/death with the melodies of far more accessible melodeath, Japan’s Heteropsy demonstrate that they understand this concept to their core. Of course, doom/death and melodeath are themselves hybrid forms of music, so really Heteropsy seems to be double-two-great-tasting their way to a four-great-tastes-that-taste-great-together kind of musical mix on full length debut Embalming (just go with it). “However,” you say, “tons of bands combine melodeath with doom/death,” and yes, you’d be right, but what Heteropsy is doing here doesn’t sound like Swallow the Sun or Mother of Graves or your more typical “melodic doom/death” bands, but really like they aimed to maintain the full range of their source material without softening the edges.

To start, Embalming is heavy–really heavy. This is partly achieved through a guitar tone that doesn’t think Dismember’s Pieces EP is thick sounding enough (not an exaggeration), providing a grit to the album that punishes your speakers during both the more monolithic, foreboding doom passages and more upbeat melodeath moments. And those melodeath moments – while not sounding like In Flames or Dark Tranquillity or the catchiest side of the style – do indeed pull from a number of influences you don’t normally hear aligned with something so particularly nasty.

For one, the tone isn’t the only thing that’ll make you think of Dismember. From the harmonized riffs of “Pandemonium Alter” to the speedy tremolo lines of “The Sodomizer,” many of the album’s melodic passages sound like Dismember’s more melodeath albums played through molasses, while a lot of the slower material calls to mind bands like diSEMBOWELMENT, the earliest Paradise Lost recordings, or Autopsy at their slowest and greasiest (the aptly-titled “Asphyxia”).

Most of the record is played somewhere along this spectrum, crucially never giving up the grime that really gives Embalming its character. Even the softer moments – such as much of the near-funereal “Memento Mori” – maintain this dirty, sooty atmosphere, thanks in large part to that guitar tone, of course, but also in how Koki Fukushima’s high quality growls and bellows refuse to give way to clean singing even during these parts. These contrasts – between beauty and filth, melody and gleefully hammering heft, plodding doom and blasting death metal – help to provide just enough variety over the album’s 44 minutes. It’s a runtime that feels rather efficient, especially with the band emptying out their bag of tricks on lengthy closer “Old Friends.”

Overall, Embalming doesn’t really do anything new, but it reveals Heteropsy to be a band with a ton of personality, not to mention a real understanding of the flavors they’re choosing to combine on the record. So if any small aspect of the above appeals to you – be it the doom/death, the melodeath, the chewy guitar tone, the preposterous heft – let Embalming give you a good flattening. Like sea salt sprinkled on the corner brownie, odds are you’ll enjoy it.