I had a roommate in college who would regularly say, “I’m gonna spray noodles out your dome” after a few drinks (i.e. shoot your brains out of the back of your beautifully shaped head). Now, this was all in jest and stemmed from a hip hop song he was a big fan of, but sadly, I can no longer recall which one it was. That said, as this funny little ginger continued levying laughable “threats” at us, it became a phrase a group of friends all threw around and remains lodged in my brain today. In fact, I made him birthday cookies in the shape of one dude shooting another one, and I even placed noodles on the end of the pan covered in red icing. “Why bring this up?” you astutely ask as one of our roughly 63-year-old average readers, who has drunk away all of their school memories. Great question, grampy!

I might be slightly inebriated while writing this, but Nefarious Scintillations is straight up hammered.

After a very Cynic-friendly intro, “Pestilent Hints of Darkened Malodorous Vibrations” hits these notes at one point that sound like its attempting to throw drunken haymakers but hitting a wall and being met with a cartoon WHAMMY (complimentary). The very brief “Sickeningly Vague Anatomical Silhouettes” is wobbly as hell, like it’s in the midst of an intoxicated brawl, and notes are being held back in the same way someone might choke down some puke to try and sneak past the doorman. Naturally, that can only work for so long, so the song eventually spews everywhere like that one scene in Drag Me To Hell. You know what I’m talking about? If you’re a real cool guy, you do. Then there’s that slow part in “Horrifying Glimpses of Inconceivably Demented Cityscapes” that sounds like a few loose tendons trying to hold the slowly sloughing skin of a DUI moron’s elbow together as he crawls across the median.

There’s a bunch of other neat stuff here, too. Some of the shorter songs, like “Spontaneous Recollections of Unwitnessable Atrocity,” sound absolutely frantic, and much of “Swollen Torsos Adorned with Pustulating Hexagonal Crania” has the nervous energy of 50 tiny children at their first swim lesson. Then there are those rare moments of leads. The one in “Horrifying Glimpses of Inconceivably Demented Cityscapes” is a meth nightmare, while the one in the aforementioned “Swollen Torsos…” sounds like it plans to wear a suit and tie to dinner in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Ultimately, my guess would be the bass will be the deciding factor for many listeners here. It will either have you feeling like a grizzly hunting salmon, entranced by its slippery nature as you do your best to wrap your maw around it; or, maybe, it will be slipping and sliding in and out so much as to be off-putting. Either way, this one is a writhing, wriggly little thing that at the very least would capture Gollum’s attention.

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Hello(ween) all, and a very hellish Halloween to you! Be that this is the designated day of all things dead and frightful, shall we explore something squishy, a bit cadaverous? I swear I’m not rehashing Edmund Kemper pick-up lines, but wouldn’t you be chuffed if I was, you sick bastard. No, the topic of the day is Glorious Depravity’s Death Never Sleeps, a chunky stomp through horrors a tad more corporeal than your seasonal ghouls n’ gob’s, but no less spooky. Pull the needle from October Rust (well…at least get to “Wolf Moon”) and plop it onto this festering slab of no-nonsense death metal from the NYC crypts.

A vast majority of the merry cohort here at Last Rites are filthy deathophiles of the lowest order. These meatballs can actually discern the difference between Trichomoniasis and a roiling sea of mechanized, spraying anuses. Professorial types, really! I am not quite as studied in this, the realm of rot n’ roll. I know what I like and I’d deign to think I have a feel for quality song and riffcraft. Therefore, I’ll turn the table and posit something to you – did you enjoy Glorious Depravity’s 2020 outing Ageless Violence? Oh, ya did, didja? Well, partner, either you’ve got a severed rabbit’s foot in your pocket or I smell a soon-to-be happy camper. Death Never Sleeps is a marked improvement on an already accomplished debut.

The immediate impression of this sophomore outing is “dang, these guys sound like they’ve been playing together for a long fucking time”, and they have! In other bands they have, anyway; each one of these chaps has a deadly resume. The truth is Glorious Depravity is fairly recent! A few years of jamming and voila, their first album was recorded and released. Brief lifespan notwithstanding – veterans are gonna veteran, and with their combined powers they conjure a savage chemistry.

Where Ageless Violence had a more rabid, clawing feel to it, Death Never Sleeps rips and tears with deliberate hostility. This is not lightspeed blasting fury nor knuckle-dragging bludgeoning nor diminished arpeggio fluttering – this is a direct injection of classic death metal’s black blood pushed through a clean syringe. Opener “Slaughter the Gerontocrats” sets the stage with menacing glee. A rolling tom and snare salvo brings in the rest of the dudes who proceed to rip your aging guts…out. Glorious Depravity have a knack for cutting up and splicing different riffs together into new and nastier formations and this track is my favorite example. There aren’t too many melodic or rhythmic motifs in this song, and most people might interpret that as derogatory. It is absolutely not. This is not the kind of death metal that requires unending, whiplash variations to maintain interest. This IS the kind of death metal that will use every ounce of meat it has to rearrange your face into new and unanticipated forms.

I can’t tell ya how dialed in this group is. I can try – see right here right now. The core band nails every verse, every transition with pinpoint precision yet it never feels like it’s been quantized and programmed to oblivion. The tones are obviously organic; it’s simply the sound of four professional musicians, playing comfortably together and sinking their teeth into the material. George Paul and Matt Mewton’s riffs are, to paraphrase Gandalf Grayhame, never too much and never too little. They hit exactly as they need to. Special mention must be made of “Necrobotic Enslavement” in the 6-string department, which begins with a “The Wretched Spawn”-esque sliding groove and runs the gamut elsewhere from sinister trills to 5/4 chromatic descents. Still, nothing is over the top! In an age of maximalist instrumental weaponry, this is the Halo: Combat Evolved pistol. Simple, powerful and deadly.

Pictured: the proud future owners of your lunch money

Doug Moore’s vocal performance is the cherry on top. Of all the improvements upon their first record, the vocals are chief among them. The nasty gutturals are back (see the bulk of “Stripmined Flesh Extractor”) with a plethora of additional tricks. At times he sounds downright playful, altering his tone and pitch strategically to give words a hooky clarity. Death metal doesn’t need a charismatic frontman, vocally. After all, the genre’s typical mission does not extend beyond aural decimation. Then you listen to a band like Glorious Depravity who have combined the hammer-strength instrumental chops with the deftness of an especially engaging leader. Peanut butter and chocolate-type union, right there. Lyrically, the themes trend equally toward lurid takedowns of the modern world as they do your expected tales of bloodletting and Woe (did u c that haha). “Carnage at the Margins” skewers white-collar corporate culture while still reading like an incantation from the Necronomicon. I encourage seeking out physical copies of this one if only to get your eyes on the text, and of course also to toss a few rubles to your boys. Shit, snag a vinyl to catch a blown-up glimpse of that sick, sick artwork. Mr. Seagrave is a legend, it is known, but hot damn this one’s a real keeper, ain’t she?

At under 35 minutes, Death Never Sleeps bulldozes in and out without any flowery fanfare or noodly hoo-ha or spacey boop-beeps. In this age of genre atomization where everyone is quick to splice anything BUT what they should be doing into what they’re ACTUALLY doing, it’s refreshing to hear guys lock into the core of what makes death metal effective and blacksmith it into a bludgeon that’ll outlast our impending nuclear winter. Rip it, don’t skip it.

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Because Demiurgon is relatively brutal, quasi-technical, and Italian, comparisons to Hour of Penance, Hideous Divinity, and Unbirth may be tempting. That distinct sharp riff groove is there, no doubt. It’s an undeniable characteristic and highlight of Demiurgon’s sound. It is as firm a feature as any present on Miasmatic Deathless Chamber. But what distinguishes Demiurgon from its brethren is an adherence to a beat that at times resembles something closer to Vader or mid-period Decapitated. Make no mistake—Demiurgon revels in a decidedly more brutal direction than those two, in the whole. Yet there’s something in the groove here that is markedly different from their Italian brutal death metal peers. And if this isn’t obvious, that distinction makes Miasmatic Deathless Chamber a more interesting listen than I was initially expecting.

Demiurgon wastes no time in opening with, “Worldwide Grave,” a statement song that delivers on that sharp riff meets Vader-esque groove aesthetic. There are tempo changes, melody, and—underlying all that—a deceptively orchestrated brutality that operates as the engine of Demiurgon’s sound: always moving things forward.

Miasmatic Deathless Chamber is ultimately the breath of fresh air I didn’t know I needed. This year has been an objectively exceptional year for brutal death metal, particularly of the no brakes and more experimental variety. The way Miasmatic Deathless Chamber fuses the sharpness of more typical BDM with the kind of death/thrash groove of mid-period Decapitated makes it a welcome departure from that scene.

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One of the more interesting tricks Floating pulls off here is exactly how they integrate the two main sides of their sound. Sometimes they intentionally separate them, offering passages of clean, sparse guitar lines straight out of the Joy Division playbook before exploding into sections of Gorgutsy dissonant riffing and (admittedly somewhat restrained) blasts. “Grave Dog,” for example, spends a lot of time imitating a less claustrophobic version of Colored Sands before an outro that could easily work in a Robert Smith love song. But more often those elements are combined, resulting in that oh-so-effective vibe that can’t help but act as the initial hook into this record.

Add in a subtly dynamic vocal performance – emotive and haggard growls and screams with a serious Luc Lemay affinity – and you get an almost deceptively wide range of particular sounds. At different times it might sound like Demilich running face first into Killing Joke, jangly and trippy like early Oranssi Pazuzu (“Exit Bag Song”), doom/deathy like Brave Murder Day-era Katatonia, or a little psychedelic like the aforementioned Morbus Chron. It’s tight but drifty, suspenseful but escapist, and always written with a great sense of flow and tension.

That tension is perhaps the greatest trait that Floating unlocks through their genre blending. Between the high, screaming tremolo lines, jangly punk riffs, bits of throbbing synths, and injections of dissonance, Floating weave some rather wide and tense song arcs despite most of these tunes having very tight run times (only two extend past five minutes in length). There’s a lot going on here despite nothing being particularly cacophonous in the instrumental department, and at just over 35 minutes in length, the album might feel like a bit of a whirlwind at first, especially if you’re spending a lot of time focused on how exactly they’re making Siouxsie and the Banshees vibes mix so well with wacky death metal riffing.

Which is, of course, a testament to the band’s songcraft and overall chemistry as a duo. Hesitating Lights will likely and rightly get a lot of attention for being a pretty impressive blending of two seemingly disparate styles of music – you just read a lot of words stating exactly that – but ultimately and more importantly it’s a very impressive set of songs. Vibes are great, but vibes that hook you only to slowly reveal a bunch of well written and interesting music? That’s the ticket.

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The difference is that Obscureviolence spends a good amount of their time in the business of moving said asses through heaps of Morbid Angel-ish riffs, big time grooves, brutal hooks, and a rubber-bandy bass sound that is almost as percussive as the drums themselves (seriously, the bass sound is just tip top). Different ears will likely hear bits of everyone from Angelcorpse and touches of the thumpier side of Vader to Ulcerate and the earliest Bolt Thrower in the riffage. The band’s tendency towards rather gargantuan and thick riffs makes for a fun contrast to the atmosphere and war metal hammering, especially when the solos can shift between unholy divebomb nonsense (that’s meant in the best way) to effectively melodic. At equal times you feel like you’re being damned to horrors unknown and left to slide around in the riffy grease. Listen for the latter in “The Absurdity of Existence” as the drums blast and roll and basically empty out their whole toolbox to maximize the fun.

It’s an effective mix, and one that should service Obscureviolence well as they further develop their songcraft and identity. Rule number one is always to bring the riffs, after all, and Refuting the Flesh comes correct in that department.

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(language or speech) is written across a closed eyelid. Is this abstruse symbolism? Is it vapid provocation? Who cares? This guy here on the cover is already calling me an asshole for asking the question.

rally like bugs crawling on your skin. About the only time the album gets conventionally “pretty” is around 3:10 or so into “Stain (Fantasy),” but even that clean guitar line lasts only a few bars before splashy drums and nervy backing guitar push it out of view. Speaking of, Humanism answers the unasked question, “What if Massive Attack’s Mezzanine was played by Deathspell Omega circa Drought?” or maybe “What if BAND interpreted Radiohead’s King of Limbs as the soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis?” The bass work in particular gives Malconfort a flavor that should tickle the nostrils of followers of Bill Laswell or Mick Harris’s Scorn. “Cruelty (Elation)” drops out completely after 2ish minutes, only to come back in with close-mic’d guitar and drums and feel quite lite

means anything to you. The devoutly peculiar racket contained within Humanism, however, is so confounding and enticing that the quest for antecedence soon fizzles. These songs live in a perpetual monochrome strangeness. Humanism is the debut album from a new trio out of the UK, Malconfort. The album’s press materials mention that members of the band also play in bands called Sea Mosquito and Amaltheia, so God bless you if that

cymbals often drop into slow-motion breakbeat patterns that goad the strings from band member Fas into twistier sheets of sound. On “Carnivore (God),” for example, Kopczak leads with spacious beats while Fas spools out lazy, dejected fragments of guitar melody. This song probably hits the biggest crescendo of the album, as that coiled tension looses briefly towards the end – “GOD IS POSSESSION! GOD IS CONTROL!” – but the band never truly takes their hands off the reins, leaving that knotty energy to pace and paw the ground. Opening track “Compulsion (Ecstasy)” drops in brashly with wailing, processed vocals, but that initial intensity quickly vanishes in favor of a jittery landscape of squiggly guitar and funky bass/drums interplay. Vocals are handled throughout Humanism by band members Nuun and Kopczak, but Kopczak’s drumming just as often takes on a leading role. The crisp snare and full palette of active

talking to? Is something dreadful about to happen in another room, around another corner? Moments like this – the speaker mumbles, “Maybe I should have taken action against myself” – give Humanism a distinct noir sensibility, like Ulver’s Perdition City or the quieter moments of the Axis of Perdition’s Urfe, like something David Lynch would listen to while reading Raymond Chandler and making a stop-motion film of decaying peonies. The only element of Malconfort’s sound that gets particularly extreme is the vocals, but even so, the harshness is used sparingly, and is routinely interlaced with whispers, barely audible crooning, laughter, and spoken word asides. On “Rage (Indulgence),” for example, the lyrics are delivered as a detached monologue, just enough under the surface of the song that it sounds like you’re listening in to something happening just out of frame. Who is the speaker

like an image photocopied again and again and again until it blurs into a pulpy silhouette. You can think about other edge cases like Dodheimsgard, Fleurety, Code, and Virus, but with Malconfort’s sparse atmosphere, jazz- and electronic music-indebted drumming, and dubbed-out basslines, they will surely also appeal to fans of later Chaos Echoes and Aluk Todolo. The music’s oddness, however, is driven by its shape and execution rather than instrumentation, because with the exception of some understated synth work that paints around the edges, Malconfort works strictly with guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. Stylistically, Malconfort plays an avant-garde black metal that is so far removed from black metal’s origins as to be nearly unrecognizable, 

ning of the first song? Humanism’s song structures are jutting, jagged, rarely cyclical, moving from one thought to another and sometimes stopping midstream to go somewhere entirely different. The album itself is a macro version of the same, swaying and looping as if each moment could be either beginning or end. You know how Pink Floyd’s The Wall has that almost hidden “Isn’t this where we came in?” that’s split across the very end of the final song and the very begin

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Have you ever hung out with a dumb, smart person? You know, the kind of person that will blow your mind by saying one of the most compellingly intelligent things you’ve ever heard and then immediately break your brain because they have no idea how to work a toaster. I’m talking about the kind of person you spend an hour with, and then you go, “How the hell does this person get by on a daily basis? Also, I’m terrified of what they might achieve in certain industries.” Well, Replicant is the music equivalent of that anomalous individual we’ve all met at least once. Listening to the entire 45 minutes of Infinite Mortality is like being dumb enough to punch a hole in a wall but then immediately having the detailed know-how to perfectly stitch all wounds and set all broken bones without looking anything up.

CONTENT WARNING!!!

This album may contain whirling dervish bedlam, stuttering rhythms, driving tremolo deathly goodness, an early-2000’s Meshuggah riff, slick grooves, hideous drunken leads, slow chugging chord abuse, pure blasting insanity, gloriously unhinged vocals vomiting all over a drag-out fist fight of a beatdown, and strange alien laser noises firing and echoing across your ears.

You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Wow, that’s so many kickass things to have on one album.” You’re right, of course, but I was only talking about what happens in the FIRST GODDAMN TRACK. Click play on that bad mammajamma whilst you read the rest of this gibberish.

What if, in addition to the above warning, I told you Replicant can also somehow pull off layering proggy elements into a chugging beating and groove-laden smoothness all at once? And what if they fired off one of the wonkiest, booziest riffs you’ll ever hear, but it will stumble out of the song as quickly as it appeared? Or that they created a passage that sounds like Gigan banging Pink Floyd after snorting a pound of angel dust? Tricked ya again; that all happens just in “Reciprocal Abandonment!”

Speaking of “Reciprocal Abandonment,” let’s chat about my other favorite element of dumb smart guys on display here – the song titles. There is pure, glorious death metal nonsense among the likes of “Orgasm of Bereavement,” “Nekrotunnel,” “Planet of Skin” and “Shrine to the Incomprehensible.” You know what else is incomprehensible on album number three? James Applegate’s drumming, that’s what. Put on “Shrines to the Incomprehensible” and just try to keep up. Like attempting to headbang with George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, you simply cannot.

One of the things that helps this style of music survive is the brevity of each part. Every song is a tightly knit collection of wild ideas that put the listener in a blender so that every time you think you have it figured out, they slice you in a new way. Replicant writes music for people with the attention span of the internet age. You might think a 45-minute runtime or nine-minute closing track would then be a detriment, but constantly shifting to new elements makes every moment something to savor and listen to again and again. A longer track like the opener is just as capable of keeping you hooked and flying by in the blink of an eye as a short track like “Dwelling on the Threshold.” Even all nine minutes of “Planet of Skin” will keep you enthralled because it slowly batters you down with repeated parts just before coming out of left field with a sexy little passage that pulls from the Oranssi Pazuzu playbook. Who would even think of putting space exploration notes in the middle of a Demilich song? Four lunatics from New Jersey getting their brains rattled by earthquakes, that’s who!

My advice to you, be smart and get dumb with Infinite Mortality right now.

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Here’s a one-image review of Chitin, the latest full length from Defect Designer:

Oh, do you require more information? Okie dokie. Here we go…

Defect Designer’s lineup has shifted considerably since their early days in Russia. Now based in Norway, they are simply the duo of bassist / vocalist Martin Storm-Olsen and vocalist / guitarist Dmitry “Mr. Scavenger” Sukhinin, the lone constant member and mastermind. Sukhinin is also currently in Norway’s weirdo skronk-death kings Diskord, and if you think that band gets a little out there, you’re in for a bit of eccentricity shock with this record.

In other words, Defect Designer’s death metal is definitely death metal but doesn’t necessarily appeal to listeners in typical death metal ways. Riffs are often constructed in a catchy manner but too dissonant or abrasive to be infectious to most ears, and at other times are incredibly spastic, rubbery, or both; the music is crazy technical but the overall feeling is often more of controlled chaos than actual tech metal; the drums, courtesy of guest Eugene Ryabchenko, blast over whatever seems apt at the time but just as often hit a straightforward drive that gives the album a punkier vibe; and the vocals range from deep gutturals to harsh screeches and everything in between, typically holding onto a good amount of the sass and personality that they share with the riffs.

The overall effect is heavy, zany, grindy, and positively bonkers. Thankfully it’s also frequently pretty great. Key tunes / moments ‒ if they can exist in an album so unpredictable ‒ include the fun shifts from a forceful, pounding drive and antagonistic noise / mathcore riffs to knuckle-dragging wallops in “Certainty After the Kafkaesque Twist” (plus brief moments of melodies and speed-picked heavy metal thunder); the almost straightforward blasting death metal and spaced out leads in “To Ziggurat” (plus a ton of bass and guitar ballet action); and the preposterously kooky and catchy-to-the-right-ears onslaught of “We Will Need Your Chitin” (plus both stop/start and slower passages that seem downright drunk). You get the point—no idea is safe from what is about to devour it, and Defect Designer positively refuses to ever sit still.

If the band’s core sound isn’t insane enough for you, buckle up. The album’s twists and turns are where Defect Designer really seems to either be indulging every idea in their brains ‒ for better and sometimes for worse ‒ or at least to be slightly taking the piss. (Some listeners will sense the urge to call this avant-garde, but the band probably doesn’t want to be taken so seriously.) First, there’s the expertly crafted but completely out-of-the-blue radio rock tune they did with Soilwork’s Björn Strid on vocals (“Shine Shine”). Not even the rough edges of Defect Designer’s riffs or the song’s oddball finish can affect how smooth, soulful, and sleek Strid’s vocals make it seem. It’s very enjoyable, but it’s so different in mood and pacing that it also feels quite out of place. Then there’s the 43-second humppa interlude, the time they reference the Macbeth witches doubling and bubbling, the” Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” part (really), and plenty of material that leans as close to Calculating Infinity as it does Tomb of the Mutilated.

Need more? There’s also “Story of a Styrofoam,” which in under four minutes features hyperblasting death metal, dissonant math grind, and a lounge music passage that disappears as quickly as it shows up. Plus weirdo clean singing, industrial riffs and rhythms, and nutty melodies in the ensuing “Insomnia.” Until the killer closer “Orgone Accumulator” kicks off with a burst of aggression it seems like the entire second half of this album is going to be a near constant and schizophrenic explosion of outlandish ideas. It doesn’t always work, and sometimes it’s even a little off putting, but you’ve got to appreciate the fearless quirkiness. Or the quirky fearlessness? Sure.

But what did we expect from an album with that Ian Miller cover art? An album that opens with a song quite gloriously entitled “Uglification Spell”? An album named after a substance found most commonly in the cell walls of fungi and exoskeletons of bugs (of both land and sea variety)? Well, you’d expect aural bananas, that’s what, but even all those items don’t quite capture what makes Chitin so simultaneously fun and what-is-happening perplexing. After listening several times I can’t decide if it’s more David Lynch than Tim Burton; it’s both and neither at the same time. It’s Eraserhead played at 10x speed with a pink lens filter, Beetlejuice just as funny but Otho is a serial killer, Twin Peaks but Dr. Jacoby is the hero, and/or/definitely-not-but-also-yes A Nightmare Before Christmas, unaltered.

Maybe it’s Lynch’s version of Dune: technically marvelous, extremely confident, somewhat flawed in holistic execution, ultimately kinda irresistible…

…and as unabashedly weird as Sting in his Dr. Manhattan underoos.

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