DRIPPING DECAY: “RIPPING REMAINS”

(Hot on the heels of their blistering debut album, Festering Grotesqueries, Portland’s Dripping Decay spewed forth a new EP in January 2024 via Satanik Royalty Records, and DGR finally caught up with it, provoking the following review.)

Always being behind the eight ball when it comes to playing catch-up with music releases has proven to be the best sort of motivator in a twisted perversion of the idea.

When you have a deadline upcoming there’s always a sense that you can relax a little, and we have been lucky enough to receive our fair share of early promo works that have allowed us time to really soak in a release and absorb as much as it can offer. But the ones where we miss the bus or discover later? Now it feels like we owe them, which is strange given that many of these are ones we’ve found on our own time or became part of our own private collections to dive into.

This is the case with Oregon’s Dripping Decay and their late-January EP Ripping Remains (we did receive a timely promo, btw).

This is about as raw a cut of death metal meat as you could find, with some surprisingly doom-oriented grind riffs that keep the band cloaked in both darkness and fog. They’re part of a wave of revivalists and demented tomb-robbers, gleefully grabbing, mutilating, and revitalizing a genre that has cycled back around as metal scenes continue their quest deeper into the Earth’s core in the quest for all things ‘heavy’.

Dripping Decay‘s Ripping Remains continues right where their Festering Grotesqueries album entombed itself, for a leaner, meaner and even more contorted genre experience than what the album itself offered.

For those who absolutely adore the murk-ridden swamps of the current knuckle-dragging death metal revival the past five or six years have been a complete party. Wave after wave of bands keep coming and a lot of them have proven to be fairly competent at making the corpse of an already well-trodden and undead style move once again, either forcefully stomping their own brand onto it or mutating it into their own particular creature.

With so many of these groups clearly able to follow a blueprint, you almost have a constant guaranteed flow of ‘seven or above’ out there in the world, perfect for shuffling but ultimately becoming a faceless mass of gore that can feel a little empty at times.

Many of these bands have absolutely nailed the aesthetic at worse, terrifyingly so, perfectly placed among the legion of bow-legged individuals in tight jeans and leather jackets – spikes optional – and placed within a graveyard next to some poor long-dead schmuck’s mausoleum and captured in black and white photography. Very rarely do you ‘hear’ a photo but after a while you see a band with a shot like that and you could almost blind-throw a dart at which specific area of the muddy waters of the death metal swamp they’ll be emerging from, picking bugs and detritus out of their hair in equal measure.

While Dripping Decay are certainly part of that rotten legion, there is something more to the band and some of it shows on Ripping Remains, both their taste for thrashier stuff – especially in the cover song that closes things out – and their grindier aspect, meaning you get a no-bullshit and zero-tolerance for time-wasting songwriting style on the faster numbers.

Three of the six songs on Ripping Remains are well under the three-minute mark, with the opening number even having some weight trimmed by the fact that it starts with a car crash noise. A perfect combination of high-speed, without getting overtly blast-heavy, and some sinister theatrics, “Ripping Remains” as a song is part actual music track and part introduction to the whole EP, given that no idea returns to the song for a second lap.

It spills right over into the bass-rumbling “Emanating Necrosis” afterward. “Emanating Necrosis” is a circle-pit stirrer of a track and it’s clear throughout its limited run time that Dripping Decay are aware of that; it’s a purpose-built song that burns through its time.

The opening two as a combo make a good one-two punch before Dripping Decay segue into the more studious (barely) and thicker songs in Ripping Remain‘s tail-end dash. It’s a common sequence for EPs to have those meatier numbers in the center and Dripping Decay answer that call as well with its two crawlers placed right in that spot. “Lead To Kill” scrapes up against the five-minute mark like someone mid-motorcylcle crash, face first sliding on the asphalt, whereas “Wormridden Piety” is your classic three-minute stomper.

“Lead To Kill” flexes Dripping Decay‘s songwriting muscles a little more with a noisier guitar solo featuring all sorts of string-bending abuse to close things out and plenty of crawling through the dirt segments in between. The sinister atmosphere tag is in full application in these middle two songs; you’ll hear it every single time Dripping Decay make the brief time for a guitar lead.

Many of the current septic-wave of death metal groups have found (un)life in the idea of sounding as cavernous as possible. If it sounds like it is emerging somewhere in between the steam from a city sewer, or from deep within a cave, then that is fantastic. What’s interesting with Dripping Decay in their Ripping Remains incarnation is that they sort of… don’t play within that particular sandbox.

They have a sound perfect for it and you can hear it in the veil of smoke that they obscure their music in, but the meatier textures of Ripping Remains sound more like the band are being fed through an extruder for their serving of the grotesque rather than being ensconced in the dank and damp undercroft of the Earth. Dripping Decay are even clear to hear on a few parts, bringing all of their distorted terror up to the forefront for a more cliffside-collapse sounding approach – save for bassist Jackson Jordan who rumbles the heavens with his instrument across the whole thing – and it works.

Ripping Remains is still suitably gross but this style works well when it is compacted, cubed, and hammered into current form. Dripping Decay are lethal with an objective set before them, and Ripping Remains being that objective has morphed them into succesful musical assassins.

https://drippingdecay.bandcamp.com/album/ripping-remains
https://www.facebook.com/drippingdecay