Internal Rot – Mental Hygiene

Oct 5 • Reviews, The Slumbering Ent • 2728 Views

Dipankar Mohanty reviews the debut full-length from Internal Rot titled Mental Hygiene, released via Blastasfuk Grindcore.

Crunchy grind is what comes to mind after listening to this 30 minute monster. I’ll be honest straight up. I’m a fan of selective grind and it so happens I love exactly this kind of grind, so imagine my drooling when I first heard this. Internal Rot embody the purest traits that quality grind contains – violence and freedom.
‘Mental Hygiene’ will grab you by the collar and throw you straight into a pit of wild boars. You will be shredded and eventually torn into pieces in the frenzy that ‘Mental Hygiene’ creates. Musically, it is infused with punk thrash elements and the guitar tone it carries is jagged edged similar to what Insect Warfare, Wormrot, Infanticide and Death Toll 80k employ; and that is saying “it slays”. So fans who have heard these bands before should know what to expect and be ready to lap it up.

Right from the first track Muciferous, the album is a gateway to unbridled anger and consequently, freedom. The 30 odd minutes get over in a blink of an eye. After absolutely four murderous tracks, the band also manages to get some groove in via the aptly named Sex Everywhere! It obviously doesn’t make sense to distinguish between songs in a top grindcore album like this but ‘Internal Rot’ insert some slight shifts in tempo; alternating between blazingly fast and slightly slower mosh ready parts. Albeit for a few seconds, this keeps a tab on the attention span of the listener and gives some breathing room like it is so midway into tracks like Nose in Neck and Hodgkinson St., in order to get ready for the next round of barrage that inevitably follows. The last and the longest track happen to be titled Riddled with Rage and it pretty much sums up the sentiment of the whole album.
There is a certain appeal for grind albums like these, whose expressiveness and production attracts fans from other extreme genres. Blastasfuk adds another fantastic album to its already impressive roster. Get your mosh gear on and buy this already.

RATING: 5/5(A majestic monument, a banner of triumph for the ages, like a berserk barbarian overpowering a mighty horde single-handed with time for wenches and wine on the side.)

Stream the entire album below:

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Bludded Head – Reign in Bludd

Oct 3 • Reviews, The Slumbering Ent • 2636 Views

Jayaprakash Satyamurthy reviews the new album from Bludded Head titled Reign of Bludd, released via Sleeping Giant Glossolalia.

Genres can start to feel like cul de sacs of conformity into which passion, creativity and purpose stumble only to get dragged into a vast unseemly brawl of clones in which it doesn’t matter who wins because they’re all pretty much the same. Sometimes, a band comes along to remind you of the vast badlands just outside town limits, where imagination runs free and the only wrestling involved is with one’s own demons.

Bludded Head’s first full-length comes as just such a reminded. Yes, you can point at the band’s influences – the publicity material names Noothgrush and Corrupted, and sure enough we’re in for a ride through craggy, iterated riffs, tortured vocals and inspired minimalism – but the influences are unusual in themselves, and Bludded Head don’t exactly try to create a carbon copy of their forebears. Their sound is more stripped down, organic like their influences, but pared down, brought to a modicum of tone and dynamics where every note change, every shift in texture and every pulsing backbeat feels like a part of a backporch storytelling session in a slasher flick, very intimate and immediate but somehow rife with unspoken but clearly implied menace.

‘Shitsucker Blues’ is a vast song that rides in on a twangy, plodding figure, like a clearing of the throat, slouching into a ponderous distorted stroll with guttural, pissed off classic-sludge vocals. Soft and loud sections interweave, with unsettling, low-in-the-mix spoken word sequences seeping through in the softer bits. The slow riffs and aching, incoherent vocals sometimes remind me of very early Melvins – never a bad thing – and the song builds to a terrifying peak of raging heaviness before subsiding into a long, sludgy endgame. There are hints of the loose, bluesy groove associated with a lot of sludge music towards the end, but always deconstructed, made just unfamiliar enough not to comfort you.

‘Fuckitdry’ drives piles of steaming sludge in through the gate, catching its breath now and then to let shafts of poisoned sunlight shine through. Never happy to just ride on a riff, the band soon dismantles this opening section, ushering in a creepy, minimalist second act. At a time when a lot of doom and sludge metal is getting too huge for me, too besotted with its own mass and gravity, it is incredibly refreshing to hear a song that works it all down to zero, letting you almost hear skin on string, before shrugging it all off and hurling one last stab of riffage at the speakers.

‘Pouring Rain’ is a big-boned song, filled with rangy, long-limbed, loping beats and guitar figures, from the twangy to the tarry, that are in no hurry to get where they’re going. Again, spoken word alternates with shouted-roared sections. There are tales being told here that may not be out of place in Cormac McCarthy’s Manichean Wild West. There’s a unique majesty in this song, not the bombast of wall-to-wall tone and strategically placed blue notes that passes for it all too often, but an introspective, assured presence that doesn’t struggle too hard for melody or complexity or that big riff, certain of its own pace and direction. This band makes its own maps.

Lastly, for metalheads who value texture and mood, it’s always useful to look into and take on board the things achieved by bands in the shoegaze/slowcore and early emo movements, so the band’s choice to do a very close cover of Codeine’s haunting ‘Pea’ is a great choice to end the album on a quieter note.

Bludded Head aren’t just another mid-list festival stage filler band, lionized by the doom bandwagon for a season and then forgotten. Their sound is a valid, alternate path to the arms race of sheer bulk and stasis favoured on one end of the doom sludge spectrum and the steady crossover into some sort of modern post-sludge style on the other. Stripped down, primitive and expansive, it’s like some new, feral Americana.

Rating: 4/5 (This mighty tome will resurrect the dead, but it may not turn lead to gold.)

Stream the entire album below: (via Decibel)

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Sempiternal Dusk – Sempiternal Dusk

Sep 27 • Reviews, The Slumbering Ent • 2673 Views

Dipankar Mohanty reviews the debut self-titled from Sempiternal Dusk, released via Dark Descent Records.

I’m going to look at this from two ways – one, from the view of a standalone entity and two, use my experienced ear in order to determine if this has that certain punch to stop my heartbeat for a second or two. In the last decade, the ‘bestial’ black/death genre has been a victim of repetitiveness. The genre remains cocooned in its own sanctuary, except for a few who have ventured outside its set boundaries like Adversarial, Portal and Mitochondrion. Apart from those few bands which remain in a minority, the rest have been riding on the waves of the cavernous low-fi production and constant riffing pattern that form the base of every other black/death album. Hence, musically it will always be a genre with a limited scope to grow and will certainly put off listeners who expect more energy and dynamism in riffing and songwriting. However, the good thing that it does, albeit for a brief period of time is manage to fit and subsequently entangle the listener into its one dimensional pattern. It doesn’t happen very often but sometimes it definitely does.

Sempiternal Dusk play mid-tempo black/death built upon the unwavering pattern of doom. The end result is a doomy form of black/death with no deviations from its course similar to 13th Moon’s ‘Abhorrence of Light’. The first thing that’s going to hit the ears is the monstrous wall of sound. The production is great with all instruments rearing out their heads equally. Moon Beneath Hook Cross gets things off to a promising start with a riff sequence till 2:45 which then leads to the main song. This particular song and Upon the Gallows of Perihelion are the highlights of the album for me. Moon Beneath Hook Cross then runs along a mid tempo pattern changing slightly in the middle, and then moving to another sustained sequence for the remainder of the song. Upon the Gallows of Perihelion is more of the same thing but manages to shuffle things a bit by inserting an atmospheric background at about 7:35. The song ends with a melodic undertone as well. I would have been happy with the above mentioned songs forming the album. Those slight ripples on an otherwise flat surface break the monotony a little bit, otherwise the remaining 20 odd minutes is cut from the same cloth. Summing up, we have that mid tempo tremolo riffing sustained and repeating over a long duration, we have slight changes in the mix on occasions and we have that typical cavernous atmosphere driven by the production that is typical of bands residing deep within the territory of Dark Descent Records. All these ingredients will probably make hardcore black/death fans salivate keeping in mind that the only objective of Sempiternal Dusk was to create an atmosphere based on a foundation of doom-based repeating black/death pattern. So if one were to look at it as just an individual entity shunning out other quality releases of the past, then it might hit hard. It’s worth repeating that this applies more to fans who really are in love with the genre. But, if one were to bring in some great prior experiences from different genres, the aura diminishes a bit. So, the somewhat critical fans who demand more from their metal will not. Having said that; this is not by any means a bad debut, but at the same time it leaves a lot of room for inculcating some tempo changes and expansion of pre-set boundaries, that is if the band wants to go in that direction.

RATING : 3.5/5 (This hardy band is on the path to greatness. But only on the path.)

Stream the entire album on the bandcamp player below :

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