AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: REAPING ASMODEIA — “IMPURITIZE”

 

What you’re about to experience is a full stream of the new album Impuritize by Minneapolis-based Reaping Asmodeia, which will be released by Prosthetic Records on February 24.

As you approach the album it may help to imagine yourself being strapped into some futuristic road machine with a deranged yet precise artificial intelligence of its own, one that rockets ahead with all the turbochargers and afterburners wide open, veering and careening with abandon, leaving the road (and the surface of the earth) with no warning, plunging into ravines, crashing through stands of timber like they’re blades of grass, scattering combatants in an active war zone, jamming on the brakes one minute, flooring it the next, and shaking your skeletal structure to pieces at the same time as it scrambles your brain over high heat into a foaming froth.

 

 

The band refer to their brand of bludgeoning, hyper-accelerated lunacy as “Progressive/Technical Deathcore”. The music on display here is fast and ferocious, jolting and jarring, technically eye-popping and maniacally inventive. Driven hard as hell by a combine of clobbering bass and body-perforating drumwork, the songs are all on fire, loaded with darting and seething riffs, swirling arpeggios, starburst soloing, and no regard for human welfare. The vocals are no more sympathetic or remorseful, venting a torrent of fury through a mix of grisly growls and wild, incinerating shrieks.

The band combine disorienting tempo changes and stop-start rhythms with bouts of pneumatic jackhammering and eye-wateringly fast fretwork, all the better to disassmble the listeners into their component parts. There are a few doomy digressions here and there, and brief sequences of fluid, entrancing melody, but there’s really no chance to catch a quick breath until you reach the seventh track, and although the eighth one is less brake-neck in its pacing at the beginning, it soon enough ramps back up into a neuron-twisting roller-coaster ride that continues right through the album’s end.

Okay, enough with the introductory verbiage; you’ve been warned. Proceed at your own risk, and make sure you have an extra supply of adrenaline handy — you’re going to need it.

 

Impuritize was mixed and mastered by Zach Ohren (Fallujah, First Fragment), and it can be pre-ordered HERE.

The band also have a tour coming up soon, and here’s the schedule:

TOUR DATES
2/24 Duluth, MN – Beaners
2/25 Waterloo, IA – Spicolis
2/26 Kansas City, MO – Bubba Spins
2/28 Moline, IL – The Island
3/1 Omaha, NE – Lookout Lounge
3/2 Bartonville, IL – Dizzy Deans
3/3 La Crosse, WI – The Warehouse
3/4 Minneapolis, MN – Lee’s Liquor Lounge
3/5 Eau Claire, WI – The Plus
3/17 Fargo, ND – The Aquarium
3/18 St. Cloud, MN – The Loon

REAPING ASMODEIA on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/reapingasmodeia/