AN NCS PREMIERE: DEAD AND DRIPPING — “MOLECULAR DEGRADATION UPON WARPED ONYX STOVES”

Since 2016 the one-person New Jersey band Dead and Dripping has lurked in a far subterranean corner of the sonic torture chamber known as “brutal death metal”. Over the course of a pair of demos and a pair of albums, its music has proven to be far more bamboozling than the typical pile-driving thuggery and bullet-spitting mayhem for which the genre is best known. The music has been unusually intricate and technically impressive, though it would be wrong to try to slot it into the “technical death metal” framework, and it has trended in increasingly macabre directions.

All of those qualities stand out in Dead and Dripping‘s new album Blackened Cerebral Rifts, and indeed this new one is even more surreal and schizophrenic than what has come before, even more technically complex, and yet somehow also ruthlessly bludgeoning and gruesome. For those reasons (and others), the vividly colorful and strikingly bizarre cover art by Jason Wayne Barnett is an excellent companion for the music. Not for naught does Transcending Obscurity Records recommend it for fans of Wormed, Demilich, and Defeated Sanity, as well as Suffocation, Mortal Decay, and Wicked Innocence.

Three songs from the album have already premiered, and if you’ve heard those you have a very good idea of what you’ll be getting yourselves into when Transcending Obscurity releases the album on August 11th. But especially if you haven’t heard any of those, and even if you have, the song we’re premiering today is well worth your time.

Today’s new song, “Molecular Degradation Upon Warped Onyx Stoves“, is the new album’s penultimate track in the running order.

In the song’s mid-paced opening phase, the music’s sensations are hulking and hideous, and seem even more monstrous because of Evan Daniele‘s reverberating guttural roars. But as the song progresses, it becomes considerably more freakish. The drums go off in mad, clattering flurries; the guitars dart and writhe in maniacal spasms; the vocals descend into deep, croaking gurgles, like a crocodile trying to digest some poor wildebeest it swallowed whole.

It all sounds tremendously macabre, and the sudden percussive starts and stops make it even more un-balancing. But following a bridge made up of those horrid gurgles and big smashing and crashing sonic blows, the music staggers into a heavy rhythmic lurch. In a twisted way it lets you get your groove on — twisted because that lumbering cadence is insidiously spiked by quivering, slashing, and screeching guitars and by skull-smacking snare-work whose interplay with the groove is off-kilter.

In a recent interview (here), Evan Daniele explained that his goal was “to really get weird and open up the riffing style,” “to create a strange and surreal atmosphere,” but also to reward listeners for the chaos they experience by including crusher grooves that will let them headbang for a while. As you can tell from just this one song, he has achieved those goals.

In that same interview, he touched on some of the album’s themes: “…dismantling and reforming associations, tides and the moon, existential duality, dreams woven indiscernibly into reality, and of course some general Lovecraft influence….” And he credits Scot Moriarty, who engineered each session (at Backroom Studios) and also mixed and mastered each album to date.

As you’ve already seen above, Transcending Obscurity will provide the release in its usual lavish fashion, accompanied by apparel. You can check out all the options and get more info about the album via the links below. And of course we’re also sharing those three previously released tracks after the links.

PRE-ORDER:
Bandcamp: https://deadanddrippingus.bandcamp.com/album/blackened-cerebral-rifts
US Store: https://transcendingobscurity.aisamerch.com/
EU Store: https://eu.tometal.com/

DEAD AND DRIPPING:
https://www.facebook.com/DeDnDrPnG69