(written by Islander)
Welcome to Part 17 of this still-expanding list, which ends this week’s rollout and paves the way toward one final sequence next week. I again had an idea of why I thought these three songs would fit together. It’s not that they’re all the same (far from it), but I still detected some kinship among them: an amalgamation of brute-force brutishness and other manifestations of head-scrambling extravagance.
In case you haven’t explored the songs in the preceding 16 Parts, you can find all of them via this link.
DISENTOMB
We didn’t get a new Disentomb album last year, but we did get a very arresting EP named Nothing Above. It was the subject of an Andy Synn review, and another review by DGR in the context of him putting the EP on his year-end list. I’ll excerpt from both:
Regarding the EP as a whole, DGR wrote: “For only four songs, Nothing Above is an expansive work. Disentomb are a band that already sounded massive – especially for a four-piece – but on Nothing Above they have somehow turned enough knobs or delineated slightly to the left enough that now they sound enormous. Why make death metal that sounds like it was recorded in a cave when you can instead just be the cave?”
Andy wrote, concerning the song I’ve picked for this list: “[T]he churning riffs and charred hooks of ‘No God Unconquered‘ (featuring a suitably monstrous guest appearance from Job For A Cowboy frontman Jonny Davy) manage, somehow, to feel both frenetically fast and suffocatingly slow, while also pushing the envelope in terms of eerie ambience and groaning, doom-laden dissonance.”
What a delicious combination of catastrophic bludgeoning and mind-melting freakishness this song delivers, along with truly monstrous vocals — but it further includes a completely unexpected detour into mysterious and beguiling ethereality, and (as Andy noted) groaning, doom-laden dissonance, like our very own guided tour of a torture chamber. And of course, it’s very infectious too.
https://uniqueleaderrecords.bandcamp.com/album/nothing-above
https://www.facebook.com/disentomb/
WESTON SUPER MAIM
I’m afraid that this year I wasn’t able to listen to all the songs nominated by our readers when I appealed to them for help (not counting those I had already heard before), but I did listen to many of them.
Two readers nominated two different songs by an international duo named Weston Super Maim. I didn’t know what to expect, especially after seeing the cover art. I don’t think I’d even heard of this band, though it was their name that induced me to check out the song recommendations, which led me to listen to the whole album, See You Tomorrow Baby. I felt like my brain had been swarmed by multiple and conflicting forms of madness — and it was fun!
Later I found a review of the album at Angry Metal Guy that did a far better job of capturing the experience than I could. It’s so good that I can’t resist sharing some excerpts:
What’s so wonderful about Weston Super Maim is that the duo doesn’t take itself too seriously. With the style of music they profess, you’d be tempted to expect a Blindfolded and Led to the Woods or Ion Dissonance, maybe leaning a bit towards Aseitas or Dysphoria. You’d probably be right – technically – but these guys describe their sound as “imagine if Meshuggah couldn’t count,” describing a blend of the mathy pioneers’ wonky rhythms, Will Haven’s dissonance, Crowbar’s riffs, Car Bomb and Humanity’s Last Breath’s boundary-pushing technicality. From the successful 2021 EP 180-Degree Murder, they have worsened their sound (their words, not mine) to unleash the ol’ razzle dazzle of See You Tomorrow Baby on unsuspecting feet.
Somehow managing to encapsulate the three-fold overlap of mathcore, djent, and dissodeath in the Venn diagram of excess, the international duo (vocalist Seth Detrick from Oregon, the instrumentalist Tom Stevens from London) also tosses in a cyber metal sorta take on atmospherics, with laser sounds and obnoxious effects atop the fray, while Weston Super Maim’s ultimate claim to fame is their absolute apeshit intensity. Chunky riffs, wild electronics, an utter lack of rhythm, and breakdowns galore add to the insanity – a strange dichotomy of unhinged bananas music and solemn and abstract lyrics. Ultimately, See You Tomorrow Baby blessedly hits the sweet spot between listenability, unhinged ridiculousness, and unashamed excess.
Upon first listen, I’m not sure “infectious” was the word that sprang to mind with any of these songs, but damned if I didn’t find myself going back to several of them when I felt the need to fry my brain again. The one I picked is “Autistic Kill Trance.”
https://westonsupermaim.bandcamp.com/album/see-you-tomorrow-baby
https://www.facebook.com/WestonSuperMaim
HYPERDONTIA
As you’ve just witnessed, not every song on this list comes from an album we paid attention to last year. The next one is also sort of in that category. We didn’t review Hyperdontia‘s new album Harvest of Malevolence, and it didn’t pop up frequently during our year-end LISTMANIA series. However, Todd Manning did put the album on his own NCS year-end list, and I’ll share what he wrote about it then:
“Death metal to summon unknown gods. These guys also mine the classics for inspiration but sidestep any direct comparisons. Instead, they churn out one killing hymn after another, possessing both the violence and fetid atmospheres that fans crave.”
As far as I can tell, the only previous attention we gave the album last year was my selection of its opening song for one of my weekly new-music roundups. It turns out that song, “Death’s Embrace,” had some stickiness in my head, so much so that I’m now adding it to this list. Here’s what I wrote before:
This one song is itself a bounteous harvest of malevolence, pulverizing and maniacally violent, and absolutely bestial in the vocal department. But as fast and furious as it is, it’s also insanely intricate, and even though the production allows us to detect every one of the rapidly moving parts, it takes a lot more than one listen to comprehend it all.
Honestly, as savage as the song is, it’s so instrumentally extravagant that it’s hard not to think of it as jubilant — and it will give your neck a good workout too. On top of all that, it turns out to be damned catchy too, which is quite an achievement, given the riotous nature of all the whiz-bang fretwork.
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/harvest-of-malevolence
https://hyperdontiaofficial.bandcamp.com
http://www.facebook.com/hyperdontia/