Wurm Flesh
(As we’ve nearly broken into the final quarter of the year, DGR decided it was a good time to do some more catching up on reviews that have been percolating in his head, and so here are five of them that might collectively scramble your own head.)
While sifting through the pile of music that I’ve been gathering up over the years for these shorter, less officious and stuffy – my preferred writing style – review collectives I’ve found that I often have a small blockage of grind releases building up against the wall. There hasn’t necessarily been a particular overarching guide as to what gets written about and when with these, as it’s more of a panicked attempt to spread the word about a few of them before year-end season hits, and I lock myself in a closet with the laptop and a caffeine-fueled fit of pique and do so much writing that I end up having zero thoughts for a month afterward.
However, this bout is my attempt to help get a few of those out there, as well as to aim for something a little shorter and then round off with two releases from way opposite ends of the spectrum that I’ve been enjoying in between checking out the shiny latest and greatest that have come tumbling down the pipeline over the last few months.
Combining this with an absolutely fucked-up concert slate for my corner of Northern California and you can see exactly where the compulsion for coverage is starting to take over, with the sense that these things need to happen now.
Wurm Flesh – Teratogenic Malformation
We start with Sacramento, California, which is somehow ringing in fall with a string of ninety-plus-degree days this year (that’s like six pence and one fruit cocktail celsius for the European crowd) and one of the more brutal death metal acts to hail from the region.
We have spoken of Wurm Flesh before, mostly as part of news roundups, so the name is not entirely unfamiliar around here. However, the end of July brought us the opportunity to speak of the band not in a sense of the past-tense with releases but with something current, when they released a new EP entitled Teratogenic Malformation – their first collection of new material in the six years since their full-length debut – via Comatose Music.
At only three songs and a hair over eight and a half minutes, Teratgogenic Malformation is about as surgical as a death metal band can get. United around death metal grotesquerie and determined to embody the spirit of the churning gravel pit style of death metal, Teratogenic Malformation is razor-wire guitar riffs stacked on top of one another, an impenetrable vocal wall, and rhythm segments with so little room to breathe in between hits that you could very well suffocate.
Eight minutes doesn’t afford a tremendous amount of time to write about but considering that this is a precursor to a full-length, there’s still room to speak. Teratogenic Malformation holds a lot of promise for fans of sheer brutality and is also the sort of EP which reassures you that although it’s been a decent gap of time between releases, Wurm Flesh are still capable of producing music on the same level of sheer-disgusting that their 2018 album Excoriation Evisceration was at. These are songs that are hyper-complicated enough and gross enough that two minutes is still plenty of time to get their message across, which is why two of the three here don’t give a shit about crossing the three-minute mark.
Wurm Flesh lie at an interesting cross-section of hammering brutality and unrelenting technicality as well, balancing on a thin musical high wire with expertise, and given their name you could almost see them as the common point of a venn daigram between Wormed and Fleshgore. Teratogenic Malformation is a truckload of fiery intensity for those who love their death metal on the morbidly obsessed side of things, soaked in offal, and joyfully playing in whatever unfortunate entrail-pile has struck their interest that day. If the spoken-of full-length that is in the pipeline is just as gnarly as this EP is, the gorehounds among us should be plenty sated.
https://www.facebook.com/WurmFleshOfficial
Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish – For A Limited Time
Sometimes I will come across an album and just know, in my heart of hearts, that a disc was made just for me. Tailored to my tastes and left at my doorstep to discover, a more pleasant surprise than the occasional dead bird I receive as a gift from the neighborhood cat colony for feeding them. Like one of those car-dealership Christmas commercials; I, cast in the role of the twenty years younger and perfectly content with my mini-mansion and two point five kids and small toy dog, am walked blindfolded outside in the snow to my driveway to discover the latest luxury car that will no doubt be the cause of many-a-hushed-whispers fight in the near future once the bills actually come due, wrapped up in a nice big bow and just for me to take for a spin.
Except, in my case it’s a grind album, it’s not the holiday season, and the fights are likely to be a lot more physical – partially because the music will be the root cause. All of this and paired with a wonderful band name like Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish and an album title like For A Limited Time. In all reality, how could I not be drawn to it?
Truth be told, part of the draw of the band was the presence of an ex-Mumakil drummer. On occasion I’ll find myself falling into weird rabbit holes of ‘what is band such and such up to now?’, usually with those that’ve hung up their hats, as a way to find new projects and general curiosities. It’s how often you’ll see bands whose members just seem to radiate outwards, with more circles of musicians converging upon each other or crossing paths, creating a strange, related web of band members you might not otherwise realize. Sometimes you wind up with a goofy, concentric snapshot of a whole scene, and other times you wind up with a raised eyebrow and clicking on a band name that is far longer than the single word ‘Mumakil‘ was, only to see a release of seventeen songs just barely clearing the twenty-and-a-half-minute mark and knowing full well that someone decided to keep plowing headlong down the pathway of blast-heavy grind.
That is what For A Limited Time is though. It is an album of careening and near-out-of-control grind, signaled to start by a four count and recorded in such a way that it sounds like the whole thing was done in one take in a rehearsal room and chopped up for brevity’s sake. The whole release is determined to mow over itself in its rush to get to the next song and songs are unleashed in volleys, grind riffs hammered together using barked and snarled vocal work as the connecting material.
There is one song in this whole thing that clears the two-minute mark in the form of “Worth it”, and earlier on, “Quarternary Mobs” comes close, but otherwise every song on here just barely leaps over a minute. The ones that offset the two-minute mark indulgences all hover at around forty to fifty seconds – of which there’s six – and bring the average run time to a ballpark minute-twenty. It’s hard to let your attention wander too far when listening to For A Limited Time because it also seems like the Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish team are always on the verge of, or are slamming face-first into, another song. The fifty-second blasters like “Motivated Reasoning” are so explosive that it’s like having a herd of animals charge into a room and exit via second story window on the way to the next slightly meatier song.
When you can easily answer with half an album’s song titles to the question “So, did you walk away with any favorites?” you’ve got a pretty good time on your hands. That opening salvo of “Consomocratie” into the aforementioned “Quarternary Mobs” is a musical launching of the dishes into nearby cars, and the one-two punch of “Words To Live By” and “Moral Patches” later on, only to have “Swiss Secrets” and its follower – deep breath – “Toppers aka The Social Use of Tupperware in an Indigenous Village: Prospects and Observations on the Impact of Modern Goods on the Local Economy and Social Structures in the Tantoyuca Region” then perform a similar act with a song in between them, transforms For A Limited Time into an audio-beating.
There’s plenty of classic, drunken-freewheeling and thrashing songwriting within For A Limited Time and you can even catch the band giving themselves room to groove. For the most part though, For A Limited Time is all about the explosiveness of the genre. Single-minded and single-dimensioned, singular purpose and completely dedicated to that alone. There’s absolutely zero chance you’re going to see the term ‘prog’ tagged on to any of this.
But sometimes, you get a release that feels tailor-made for you, and Exorbitant Prices Must Diminish‘s brand of freewheeling chaos on their first full-length – after a demo, split, and a live album – is exactly that. The idea of deeper messaging is pushed to the side in favor of placing every thought and action directly up front, and then spinning the entire event into a storm of guitars, crashing instrumentation, and an undeniably vocal wall.
https://www.facebook.com/exorbitantpricesmustdiminish
Orpheus Omega – Emberglow
I look forward to releases from Australia’s Orpheus Omega because without a doubt they draw a massive contrast to everything else I listen to. The band are effectively my ‘pop’ music – which is more an indicator of how heavy my music tastes have trended more so than a statement on the band themselves – by being a massive throwback to the years of keyboard-happy melodeath and glory-filled power-choruses that Soilwork have long made their calling card. Of course, the group’s influences aren’t something they’ve tried to veil over the years either.
We touched base with them back on their Portraits EP last year, wherein Orpheus Omega let each member of the band take charge and try to write music that drew heavily from, or was in testament to, their influences. Even then, we noticed that some of those songs seemed purposefully written to have the group’s favorite artists pop up within them, so to see Andy Gillion of Mors Principium Est fame come sailing around the corner in drunken out of control chariot fashion on that EP almost felt fated by the universe. To see the bond grow even tighter in time for Orpheus Omega‘s newest album Emberglow seems like a natural conclusion.
Now you have to realize, part of the fun of including Orpheus Omega within review collectives like this is I know damned well they’re the equivalent of unleashing a bomb consisting of cotton candy and rainbows into the darkest pits of hell, yet sometimes you need that. Orpheus Omega are a classic blueprint of a melodeath band, right as the genre had crystalized into its own thing and really broke big in the last of the ’90s and early ’00s. Orpheus Omega have waved that banner like no other, and though their discography hasn’t been perfect – 2019’s Wear Your Sins didn’t land with me as much as I would’ve expected – for the most part I know what I’m in for with the band. A lot of keyboard lines, guitar riffs that are just as much catch-laden hook as they are aggressive two-step, and a generally quick tempo. You’ll know every bit of the recipe once you hit play on a few songs here.
Emberglow is the group’s latest swing for the fences and like everything else they’ve done, even with shifts in band membership, none of it is done half-assed. Orpheus Omega throw themselves into their music and Emberglow dishes out multiple examples of just how fully bought-into their style Orpheus Omega are. While the band take some pretty hard jabs at modernizing their sound and even working in some of the weightier riff styles that dominate metal at the moment, for just as many near-brutal guitar chugs, there are melodic lines and lead parts that are otherwise finger workouts.
You can crank on the aggression knob all you want, but Orpheus Omega aren’t likely to break themselves free of working in a sing-along chorus anyway, no matter how dark or epic the album artwork might appear. They even take a few chances at displaying a flair for the theatrical with how some of the songs on Emberglow move within their respective time limits. Most of Emberglow is neatly packaged at near-four-minute songs, and you even hear Orpheus Omega tying off the bow and sending the song out the door on a few of them, but when the group do run long it is because they are trying to something a little more than being as musically straight-shooting as possible.
Case in point: It’s barely a moment after opener “We Were Kings” that you crash into the album’s title track, full of dancing guitar leads and keyboard lines so sugary sweet that you could walk away with cavities. “Emberglow” could just as easily be a throwback song to the halcyon days of youtube Dragonball AMVs with its glory-filled power-chorus and guitar shredding antics. Songs on Emberglow follow a similar format to its title track for the most part, which is how you could understand something like this becoming a near-perfect pop album in comparison to the massive walls of sludge and murk we tend to bury ourselves in around here. Would it work excellently as a gateway record for people? Yeah, absolutely. (Orpheus Omega‘s extended discography would actually be a pretty good gateway into the metal genre as a wider whole.)
Emberglow knows what the hell it is doing and isn’t too overtly crushing on the heaviness scale, though it is appreciated when you hit a song like “The Tangle”, whose opening segment is more focused on spinning up a pit that painting with pastel colors. It’s always appreciated when the low-end gets a little bit of the spotlight, and since “The Tangle” does so in its opening, it decides to be one of the earth-moving songs on the album. “Destiny Machine” before it pulls just as much from the In Flames, Soilwork, and Scar Symmetry playbook as they could in order to create a wonderful mish-mash, and then “Star Maps” is suitably all across the genre-spectrum with an opening segment that would be perfectly in line with Bloodshot Dawn‘s Demons release.
You wouldn’t expect it, but for much of Emberglow it seems that Orpheus Omega have run with what they started with on their Portraits EP release in 2023. They must have enjoyed that time making that style of red-meat-to-the-core melodeath because Emberglow is ten songs of just that, surgically written to fall within a four-minute mark and just as quickly exit the stage for the next song. They don’t waste time with any sort of mid-tempo balladry and it’s clear ‘long about song six just how much the Australian melodeath crew love themselves a combination keyboard and lead guitar duel.
It is both equally heartening and wild to hear a band like Orpheus Omega carrying the torch for this specific branch of the melodeath tree in 2024 but maybe we’re at the point now where we’ve cycled back around to this being interesting again. The thirty-year nostalgia cycle has meant that quite a few groups that hung it up a while ago have resurrected from barely lit cinders themselves, if they haven’t been throwing themselves into a blender and forming supergroups all their own. Orpheus Omega have carried this banner through quite a few lineup changes and years themselves, and Emberglow is a good example of why they’re still able to do so.
https://www.facebook.com/orpheusofficial
Serpentheir – Hypernature’s Vines
It’s been hard trying to figure out where exactly to start with the world-traveling ( okay, in actuality between three countries) adventures of Poland’s Serpentheir. Considering that this was a release long ago added to a notebook while I was traveling myself in late-May, it’s been one that I’ve cycled back around to a few times but hadn’t quite figured out just how to kick the initial boulder of words downhill to see what it picks up along the way.
Granted, the project itself is vaguely veiled in mystery, so other than a handful of names and musician Caligula‘s travels from Poland and back, it’s tough to pin down where the initial seeds were planted that eventually grew into what became the late-May release of Hypernature’s Vines. Largely a solo project, Serpentheir is of a collective of hugely ambitious acts that seek to make music far more grandiose than their solo set-up may suggest.
That means we’re often dealing with string-section embellishments, big, operatic movements, and a style of music dancing between some straightforward melodeath riff work, the once in a blue moon sharpened black metal, a lot of symphonic backing, and a much denser hybrid of the blackened-death variety. At nine songs, you certainly aren’t going to want for material within the boundaries of Hypernature’s Vines – though there’s certainly something to be said for just how this release flows.
The way the album flows suggests that it is a release best taken as one complete work. You can break songs out on their own but Hypernature is an album of polar opposites; you’ll either have an immense and indulgent five-minute-plus song or a shorter number that is a little more ferocious and quick-moving from the outset. Hypernature’s Vines dances between the two with an innate glee, given that the opening triplet of songs are of the two-minute-plus variety and then all of a sudden you have a bigger five minute number.
This is where the impression that you have a few genres slamming head-to-head with each other throughout Serpentheir‘s latest comes into focus, as songs flow into one another but the quicker tracks are very distinct as to what style they want to be whereas the bigger numbers take their time to breathe and as a result are more blended together. Many of the songs on Hypernature’s Vines segue into one another by virtue of the sudden start and stop nature, where some songs continue to build off of the blocks left behind by the track before it, and sometimes when Serpentheir is truly rolling, you’ll have the strings fading out and fading right back in. Much of that time, you’d be forgiven for missing that the song changed until halfway through when you suddenly notice that the rhythmic segment of a particular track is much more knife-sharp and stabby than the way the previous one seemed to lilt from part-to-part on a bed of orchestration.
Hypernature’s Vines is a release that mutates itself into a different beast by the time it wraps up. Songs get more expansive as the run-time goes on, and the one obviously short outlier of the bunch mainly serves to set the stage and transition between bigger songs. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that much of the songwriting sessions sort of turned around the gears of songs six and seven on this release – “Noctambulant/Somnambulant” and “Bargaining For Acheron”. You hear so much of those two songs’ larger ambitions weaving their way through the earlier tracks and the closing segments of “Over Yonder” following the pairing, that Hypernature’s Vines seems like an effort to build to and the extend beyond those two songs.
They’re both tracks that aim to sound massive and you’ll recognize a lot of the hallmarks of a musician having a blast with the synthesized orchestra available to them, using them to ratchet-down a lot of the melodic lines within those two songs while the actual traditional instrumentation goes to work on the heavier side of things. Serpentheir dwells heavily in the blackened-death-metal world in the heavier moments of this album but once you have a violin segment or two, or the classic big brass blasting behind it, you’d almost see the band wanting to stomp around in the sandbox that SepticFlesh have long been booting the other kids on the playground out of.
Hypernature’s Vines almost completely works as a release too. Serpentheir has a cargo plane’s worth of ambitions at play on their fourth full-length. There’s been a lot of influences on the group over the years and you can tell, with just how much Serpentheir are packing into the musical bag of Hypernature’s Vines. They’ve got their own history to respond back to – having put out another release just last year – and then they pile on the different styles into the overall maelstrom from there.
When you have a release that is a hair over a half hour yet somehow seems far longer, one of your bigger suspects is just how densely packed the music might be. When there’s so much to dig through, even the shorter songs on a release start to take on the air of a longer journey. Intentionally or not, with Hypernature’s Vines tying many of these songs together by either suddenly launching into the track following or sharing many of the same symphonic ambitions, it becomes one of those releases that works better as a full spin.
It’s much shorter than some of the larger epics that require that of a listener nowadays and it is one that has held a strange sort of fascination with me, where I’ve spent my couple of months parsing just how certain songs are clicking together and perceiving the bigger picture that is forming – which does come ever so close to fully revealing itself but still remains frustratingly just outside the field of view. But maybe, that’s what’s been drawing me back to the a whole, trying to envision the larger plan for this album and seeing just how much promise there is in a release like this.
https://www.facebook.com/serpentheir
Colacon – Throes Of Inundation
Do you remember a couple of reviews back in this feature where I proclaimed that I put one release in here partially because it added much-needed levity to the sewage and muck I was otherwise ensconcing myself in for my music listenings recently? That impression was colored a lot by Georgia’s sludge and grind group Colacon, because their new album Throes Of Inundation may be one of the ugliest fucking things I’ve heard this year.
Colacon haven’t existed for too long in the grand scheme of the musical world, still a young group with two EPs to their name – although in grind years they’re probably elder statesmen – but with the first few spins of Throes Of Inundation you get the sense that this is a release that comes from a much more malevolent, outright violent, and more serious place than the release preceding it. Throes Of Inundation is like Colacon had a moment when they decided to knuckle down and stare the grim void right in the face and see what came out; and what emerged on the audio channel can be best described as a goddamned mess.
While we are prone to describing musicians as coming off as rabid animals within their releases, Colacon may be one of the few groups that’ve truly earned that mantle when it comes to their second EP. At just twenty-two minutes, you can’t make it through the end of a listening session without feeling like you’ve crawled through mud. Even though the timespan is short, somehow there’s such a layer of grime layered over the top of the intentional ugly-trapped-in-a-basement style of recording that it just seems to follow you.
This a release that you don’t walk away from feeling like you’ve been bettered by the experience. It is one that happens to you, and by the time you’re done you’re not sure if you truly enjoyed the way the EP just seemed to constantly have its claws bared at you. One of the few times it even bothers to let you catch your breath for a moment is in the opening buildup of “Apprehension” before the release even kicks into high-gear. It’s more an oppurtunity to grab a decent breath of air so you can reach equilibrium underwater from the wave about to crash over your head.
Throes Of Inundation runs the gamut as well from a decadent five-minute beast in “Cessation” to a lighter back-alley stabbing in “Depravation” just three songs prior to it. Keeping in mind that there are nine songs total, you can ballpark most of the songs here at about two minutes, and for every sub-two minute rager on here, you have another that is closer to three.
On this EP, it seems like Colacon are looking to travel alongside the same path that Wake had begun to chart on their Misery Rites release yet they’ve taken it to a more gnarled and twisted place than before. Colacon don’t show much fear in bending the songs into twisted and bizarre forms as well; when they aren’t just thrashing and difficult to behold, you do get a more technical and experimental contortion to the formula. Colacon break out moments like that during “Dismal Neuma” and “Chasms Light”. The earlier part of this EP is much more singular-minded in just being as abrasive as possible, so the trip though the first three songs alone is enough that the band’s blueprint has been laid down and then stomped to such an unrecognizable point that the only way they’ll be able to identify it is with DNA records.
The entirety of this EP is awash in an awful carved-together collage of black, white, and grey, and it works. It’s one of those releases that saw a style of music and decided to weaponize it rather than add to the overall historical fun side. Throes Of Inundation jogs alongside many of the newer acts out there whose artwork is relentlessly abrasive and musically nihilistic, but instead of letting itself sink in a wash of doom and drone, it used the plug-and-play antics of grind and borrowed heavily from the sludgier and crustier side of music in order to create a beast all its own.
As a first impression, it’s like listening to a group who heard the razor-wire dragged across the throat stylings of a band like Calligram and declared ‘oh we can make that much, much, much more intense of an experience’. As only a second EP, Throes Of Inundation makes for a breathless first exposure to the world these shadow-dwellers from Georgia are creating.