(In April of this year Sacramento-based Wastewalker released a new EP dedicated to their late guitarist Nate Graham, and long-time Wastewalker follower DGR delves into it in the following review.)
Sacramento’s tech-death group Wastewalker have been put through the wringer lately. The band, finally somewhat ascendant after the release of a solid sophomore album in Vengeance Of The Lowborn, suffered from the tragic passing of guitarist Nate Graham in mid-2023. While the band were never short on talent, the group were put in a hard place on multiple fronts, yet in that time somehow managed to soldier on. The band returned in early April of 2024 with a three-song EP entitled Trapped Between Realms Of Suffering – their first as a four-piece act.
Wastewalker have been a slow burn, launching out of the gate with Funeral Winds back in 2016 and then growing into their sound from there. Funeral Winds had an air of expulsion to it, like the band had to get a ton out of their system and exorcise a cadre of demons before they could truly evolve into what is Wastewalker. Funeral Winds felt like it was moving in twenty different directions all at once, overstuffed with ideas – and sometimes even lyrically – and interesting on the front that there was a lot of promise there; Wastewalker just had to hone in on what was really working within those bounds.
Vengeance Of The Lowborn‘s release nearly four years later did just that and fulfilled on much of what Funeral Winds was hinting at. If there was a Wastewalker album where you could point to the band solidifying, it would be on Vengeance Of The Lowborn.
Which is why, even though the circumstances surrounding it – both privately inspiring said EP and publicly stated – weren’t the greatest, it feels good to say that Trapped Between Realms Of Suffering continues Wastewalker‘s upward trend, the group getting stronger and stronger with each release.
Trapped Between Realms Of Suffering opens with its longest song – and lead-off single if you were following the buildup to it – “Penitence Through Bloodshed”. Clocking in at a weighty 4:59, the song condenses a lot of Wastewalker into a solid grooving monster built around a powerful double-bass roll that grants Journal drummer Justin Tvetan the chance to get wild a few times throughout.
“Penitence Through Bloodshed” doesn’t scatter its ashes to the wind as much as previous Wastewalker songs have, and could be broken into a handful of distinct movements. A blast-heavy mid-section goes right into a solo section that allows guitarists John Abernathy and Joel Barrera to play off each other and helps break up what would otherwise a brutally pig-ignorant breakdown.
Wastewalker have already weaponized quite a few of those throughout their collective recorded works and it serves fine throughout “Penitence Through Bloodshed”, but the equal ear for melodicism and providing room for vocalist Cam Rogers to get the most shrill he has been in some time more than offsets a lot of the straightforward-core aspect. There’s plenty of fretboard-fireworks to be found throughout as well – a hallmark of a lot of John‘s guitar work over the years – and much of Trapped Between Realms Of Suffering‘s share of that is in this first song alone.
Immediate follower “The Parasitic Coil” is a little less noodle-heavy – though could still likely qualify as an Udon shop in certain towns – and very rhythm-riff focused in its opening movements. The bass guitar coming to the forefront like it does thoughout “The Parasitic Coil” works in the song’s favor, giving it much heft to throw around when Wastewalker march into floor-destroying formation. Given that it is also a quicker number, “Parasitic Coil” has a scalpel-like quality to it — built purely for the gratification of destruction but also one of the stronger ‘fast’ numbers Wastewalker now have in their arsenal. It – like the titular “Funeral Winds” song from their debut – could be easily understood live and is sculpted to be that way.
If there were an idea of “classic” Wastewalker sound, it could be argued that EP closer “The Dying Process” has its roots growing throughout that spectrum. It has all of the hallmarks of a Wastewalker track, with sinister passages laced throughout the song and bent-framework that barely holds itself together while the lead guitars get to solo over it.
“The Dying Process” is the monster-maker song of Trapped Between Realms Of Suffering and serves as a solid bookend of the three presented for listeners – it splits the difference between the wild hair-splitting nature of “Penitence Through Bloodshed” and the more made-for-live ass-kicking of “The Parasitic Coil”. It’s the summary statement of three songs that somehow, in just a hair over twelve and a half minutes, have thrown enough at you to qualify as the debris from a Category 4 tornado. Wastewalker continue to be a musical whirlwind in that aspect and sometimes you even get the luxury of hanging on for a few minutes.
The EP format has worked well for many tech-death groups over the years, especially one like Wastewalker whose ambitions have enough quills reaching in enough directions that they could pass as a musical porcupine. Over time it has become something of a truth that condensing down the constant kitchen-sink-throwing into a handful of songs and using laser precision in writing them can provide a certain amount of focus that the music would otherwise not have immediately present. Every solo becomes a nectar of the gods as opposed to another one tossed onto the conflagration and each movement becomes more easily digested. There is still much esteem to be applied to a full-length release – the multi-song snapshot of a multi-year effort has an insane amount of pull – but a musical surgical strike like Trapped Between Realms Of Suffering manages to hit equally hard.
https://wastewalker.bandcamp.com/album/trapped-between-realms-of-suffering-2
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