(This is DGR‘s review of the newest album by Baltimore-based Wormhole, which came out late last month on Season of Mist.)
With a new home on a new label, a new genre-approach, and a sizeable shift in the lineup, the Wormhole that is present on their late-September release Almost Human is an entirely different beast than the Wormhole that existed three years prior.
The guitar and drum positions haven’t changed, remaining solid since the days of 2020’s The Weakest Among Us, but the band are now joined by journeyman death growler Julian Kersey (Aegeaon, a few stints live for The Faceless) and bassist Basil Chiasson for a surprisingly different take on the group’s previous head-spinning hybrid of brutal death and slam.
photo by Eric Decarlo
Somewhere along the path that led to through the doors of Season Of Mist, Wormhole picked up a whole lot of influence from the dissonant death metal scene as well as a hell of taste for the type of melodic flavorings that Ulcerate have been putting to use since Shrines Of Paralysis. As a result, Almost Human is a weird mutant first and foremost, slamming together genres that don’t share quite the same DNA as brutal-death, tech-death, and slam do. In the process the band created an album that is equally bizarre, interesting, heavy, and yet somehow still insisting on maintaining all of the Wormhole trademarks one might’ve come to the band for in the past.
It seems strange to say it with a band like Wormhole, since the staples of the genre lend themselves to the band being whatever they want to be, so long as it is overwhelmingly brutal, but Almost Human is two different Wormholes, making for a very interesting listening experience. The group haven’t forgotten the core of their sound nor what a lot of people came to them for – especially given just how much earth-rattling snare you get throughout Almost Human – and there’s still a few word-salad song titles that make for fantastic madlibs answers, but there’s also a sense of the band trying to stretch further than just providing the next opportunity for people to declare the next segment of the song “Sick”, or spinning people’s heads with endless guitar-work until they screw off and float away.
Almost Human‘s tale of the tape is eight songs that surprisingly enough is also the shortest of the three albums the band have in the repetoire at a little over twenty-six minutes. Those eight, in total duration, fall pretty much in line with what Wormhole have done before – you may have seen us joking recently about how we do love us an established pattern round these here parts – but albums before have hovered at twenty-seven and twenty-eight and a half minutes.
If it feels like Wormhole are blazing through songs that are already blazingly fast to begin with, don’t worry, it’s not a random sense. That is what is actually happening. Once you’re past the first two songs – which were released as an opening single prior to the album coming out – nearly every song is almost surgical in being around three minutes and ten seconds and punching the hell out. The one time they go far beyond that, they then offset it later on in the album by having a song that doesn’t even bother clearing the three-minute mark.
Almost Human‘s tale of two Wormholes surprises by just how neatly it divides itself up. On one half, you have the group being surprisingly adventurous and using a lot of elements from outside their normal stomping ground to add to the music – the presence of a ton of guitar leads throughout will make this very evident – and then the other half is the sort of punching holes into the ground style of ‘dumb’ that the band are known for.
It creates a strange hybrid of tech-death, brutal, post-metal, dissonant, and slam into this amorphous creature that can never quite settle on exactly what it wants to be at any particular moment. Almost Human is restless in that sense, and in fact the one real pillar of stability is on the vocal front since there’s one thing you can definitely credit Wormhole for there: Julian spends the whole album sounding like he is gargling gravel.
The expected dynamic of vocalist vs idling truck engine is definitely in play here, and while Wormhole claim that Almost Human has lyrics, by the same token had they said that he just caveman-grunted for a half hour that’d be just as believable. There is one sort of deathcore-ish yell that lasts for a whole quarter of a second that appears out of nowhere, and it happens so suddenly that it’ll take you by surprise, the one syllable of yelled vs grunted seemingly more out of place than any number of movie or multimedia samples that Wormhole sneak in to any particular song.
Hope you’re a fan of air raid sirens, because there’s a healthy amount of that.
The newer, weirder, more artistic-aiming Wormhole is spread out among the Almost Human tracklisting but you’ll get a shotgun blast’s worth right up front with the previously released singles of “System Erase” and “Elysism”. You’ll hear the group pull in a variety of infuences alongside their musical concrete-pour that could see them going ‘what if Ulcerate got weirdly into slam,’ or in the case of some of the guitar solos in the latter-mentioned song, some of the echoing post-metal that Fallujah have long made a staple of their sound.
This styling hovers gently throughout Wormhole‘s latest musical issuance – any time the group have a melody in mind in between the constant batterings, expect to hear some heavy guitar scrapes high up on that neck – but the opening two songs, the titular “Almost Human”, and the closer “The Grand Oscillation” are where artistic Ulcerate gets to flex its muscles more. If you want the deeper, pit-riffage songs then you’re aiming for Ulcerate classic, which seems to have kept itself to the many-worded song titles such as “Spine Shatter High-Velocity Impact”, “Data Fortress Orbital Sanctuary”, “Bleeding Teeth Fungus”, and the nobel-laureate worthy….”Delta Labs”.
Okay, less so on the last one.
Almost Human‘s central segment is like a gigantic brick of ass-kicking laid right in the middle. The bookended segments are the conceptual, melodic journeys and the songs in between are the big, pit-stirring, musical ladles. That said, the aforementioned pairing of “Spine Shatter High-Velocity Impact” and “Data Fortress Orbital Sanctuary” are a ton of fun.
Almost Human is in a strange conflict with itself; Wormhole are doing an admirable job of trying to slam – heh – disparate styles into each other to create an entirely different multi-limbed monster. Often, it works, because at their core Wormhole are still just out there to dispense a whole lot of blasting drums, shredding and shredded guitar, rumbling rhythm section (which sometimes seems like the bass guitar and vocals are in competition for who can actually go lower), and the occasional media sample just to keep a listener in full ‘the hell did I just hear?’ mode.
Yes, it rips by surprisingly fast but that’s a point in its favor this time around, because much of Almost Human will get by on first impression of just how technically impressive it is at the speed it’s at. Wormhole‘s core is still sound, though not as prominent, and the musical metamorphosis taking place throughout the album seems to be that of a creature that, even a few awkward steps after sentience, isn’t quite sure of its place just yet.
The odd tech-death slam combo works well here, though it has just as many strange head-turners as it does ‘holy shit!’ sections, but we’ll cheer for that just as much as we do someone who plays it close to the chest and rigidly follows their musical blueprint for the umpteenth time. The adventurism helps keep Almost Human interesting, and yes, the drop back to the familiar keeps Almost Human stupidly-heavy, and the combo of the two is worth a few long glances.
https://shopusa.season-of-mist.com/band/wormhole
https://wormholemetal.bandcamp.com/album/almost-human
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