AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CREPITATION — “MONSTROUS ERUPTION OF IMPETUOUS PREPOSTEROSITY”

It will come as no great surprise to people who’ve been fans of Crepitation for the last 17+ years to see how preposterously wild the title of their new album is. It is, in fact, Monstrous Eruption of Impetuous Preposterosity. The trip through the new album’s song titles is perhaps an even more gonzo ride. When words recognized by dictionaries and phrases acknowledged by grammarians aren’t up to the task, just scramble the fuck out of them over a high flame and season with gobs of syllables and a heavy salting of hilarity. That’s how you get things like this:

“Vicious Entwattering of Obstinant Nepotistic Shithouses”
“Priapismic Whisking of Mucilaginous Concrete Slurry”
“Devourification of Skewerised Rottiserie Hominids”
“Superkalifragelisticexpibabyshakeus”

Even when you can find the words in dictionaries, Crepitation have a knack for stitching them together in evocatively foul ways. For example, “Methanated Propulsion of Gaseous Levitation“. What better way to name a song that was inspired by the kind of wet farts that provide a queasy recurring lift to your stride?

That particular song was one of the advance singles for the new album, and happens to be one that we premiered. It’s even more berserk and bamboozling than its title, even more jarring and gleefully mind-mangling. As we wrote at the time of the premiere:

“It has its fair share of brutish concrete-fracturing pile-driver punishment, squealing string torture, and bursting snare-drum mania that sounds like a fusion-powered titanium sewing machine stitching sheet metal. It also includes fret-leaping axe-spasms and shrill maniacally writhing guitar-swarms, as well as various phases of rhythmic percussive clattering. There are also disorienting start-stop whining sensations, vivid bass-bubbling, and hulking headbang grooves.”

That song was a good choice for one of the singles leading up to the album’s June 23rd release by the Australian label Vicious Instinct Records. It was a demonstration that, sure enough, Crepitation can play their instruments very damned well and aren’t above (or below) experimenting with what they’ve done before. The rest of the album, which you’ll now be able to hear in full (see below) reinforces those conclusions.

Thirteen songs in total, the album runs listeners through a madhouse gauntlet. Coming out the end of it, about 34 minutes after starting, you’ll be left bludgeoned and brutalized, mangled and mauled, head-spun and neck-wrecked, bleeding from many orifices, and… goofily smiling. Because, let’s be clear, the record is a shitload of gob-smacking fun.

When the first song (“Carcinogenital Space Hopper“) begins with musings about what the speaker needs to enhance focus — coffee? cigarettes? the right music? — and then follows with a couple seconds of Beethoven, and then abruptly begins crushing, careening, screeching, and gurgling with ruthless abandon, you can’t really keep a grim face on.

For sure, the pounding is cold and primitive, the chords seem to whine in agony, and the vocals are hideously monstrous (despite what you might think, we’re pretty sure no pigs or crocodiles were harmed in the making of this music), but the manic clattering of the snare, the squealing string tortures, and the rapidly darting and writhing riffage are so OTP deranged that it’s clear Crepitation put just as much stock in throwing brains into blenders as they do beating the living hell out of people.

Even that first song also shows, however, that there’s method in the madness — method in the startling combination of tonalities, method in the balance of the mix, methods in the use of pile-driving grooves to provide structure to the mayhem, method in the dosing of the music with bizarre motifs that are nonetheless insidiously infectious.

Through that song you also get early signs that despite the generally un-serious nature of the lyrical conceptions, this quintet are pretty damned serious about the execution. There are tech-happy fireworks in the midst of the rude and crude clubbing, and the kind of twists and turns that demand… focus….

Speaking of fireworks, there are even more of them ahead. Immediately, “Rancid Blubbery Encrustments” kicks in the afterburners, even more fleet-fingered in the fretwork, even more lights-out in the drumming, even more freakish in its stitching together of bizarre sonic eruptions, maybe even more hulking in its bass undulations.

And there’s a lot more where that came from in the tracks ahead. Occasionally interspersed with hilarious samples, they provide an eye-popping union of mad-scientist intricacy, serial-killer depravity, and bull-like thuggery.

We could go on plowing through each song one by one, but that would risk tedium, which is the last thing that should be done to an album that’s anything but tedious. To the contrary, every track is so head-spinning, every one of them so charged up with unexpected hair-pin instrumental maneuvers, every one of them so laden with utterly foul vocal excretions, that they manage to be relentlessly exhilarating — as well as relentlessly insane.

The PR material for the album says it well: “Tapping into a variety of musical inspirations, the album sounds like Crepitation, but with more Crepitation. Faster, slower, more tech, more silly, more grind, more extreme and more stupid.” See for yourselves:

CREPITATION is
Joseph Mortimer – Bass
Chris Butterworth – Vocals
Mark Pearce – Vocals
Ste Morris – Guitar
Tripy – Drums

Monstrous Eruption of Impetuous Preposterosity was recorded by the bandmembers in many places, it was mixed and mastered by Tripy at Horsebastard Studios, and it features suitably mental cover art by Art of Gore. Vicious Instinct is proudly releasing it on CD and digital formats, and pre-orders are live now:

PRE-ORDER:
https://www.viciousinstinctrecords.com/store/bands/crepitation
https://viciousinstinctrecords.bandcamp.com/album/monstrous-eruption-of-impetuous-preposterosity

FOLLOW CREPITATION:
https://allmylinks.com/crepitation