(written by Islander)
The Arizona band Necrambulant have a new album coming out tomorrow on Gore House Productions. Ever-interested in improving my vocabulary, I tried to look up the meaning of “necrambulant”, especially because a variant of the word also appears in the album title: Upheaval of Malignant Necrambulance.
Turns out it’s not in any dictionary (not yet). According to an 11-year-old interview of Necrambulant guitarist Ron Clark at Teeth of the Divine, it’s a word the band made up by combining the prefix “Necro” with “Ambulant” — “just a fancy way to say ‘Zombie.'”
At the time of that interview Necrambulant were about 9 months beyond the release of their debut album Infernal Infectious Necro-Ambulatory Pandemic. It might be time for another interview to figure out why it took the band so long to release more music, with 9 years passing by until their 2022 EP A Feast of Festering Flesh, and then 3 more years until this new second full-length, coming out a chunky dozen years after the first one. (I did find a quartet of more recent interviews, but they were all just the kind of stock questions that could be doled out to any band, and none of them delved into that question.)
But really, the answer is just a matter of bystander curiosity. It’s irrelevant to whether anyone should be paying attention to the band’s new album. Whether attention should be paid, of course, is a function of the music and the tastes of the listener. You’ll get to taste the whole thing — and it will get to taste you raw, without benefit of cooking or seasoning — because we’re providing a full stream today.
L – R – Andy “Bonemeat” York – Vocals & Lyrics, Ron Clark – Guitars, Matt Riena – Drums, Trent Pittard – Bass
Photo Credit: Matt Riena
Necrambulant brand their music “Inhuman Slam Grind“. Musically, they relish horror, gore, and slamming brutal death metal. Lyrically, the album draws inspiration from zombies, serial killers, cannibals, sci-fi, and Warhammer.
We don’t have our fingers constantly on the pulse of people who thrive on brutal death metal and slam, but our somewhat educated guess is that those people will eat up this album with both hands and drooling faces. The more interesting question here is whether other fans of metallic extremity will find it worth their time.
As investments of time go, Upheaval of Malignant Necrambulance doesn’t demand a lot of it, which is to say that Necrambulant don’t fuck around: They disgorge 11 tracks in about 32 1/2 minutes, and it’s a pretty even division, with all the songs landing closely around the three-minute mark, except for the title song which does its dirty work in two minutes flat.
For fans of brutal death and slam, Necrambulant check all the relevant boxes. The song titles are abundantly syllabic representations of abominably disgusting and hideously violent conditions and creatures. The vocals are equally foul, a non-stop churn of gurgling intestinal vulcanism and demented pig squeals. The guitar and bass tones provide a mix of sewer-level filth and tortured whines and screeches. The sharp-toned snare alternates between maniacal and metronomic, every beat feeling like a ball-peen hammer working on exposed vertebrae (or metal dumpster lids).
When the slams arrive, they inflict bridge-collapsing trauma — primitive, thuggish, and anti-melodic. But those ruinous pile-driving grooves will wake up most people’s reptile brains damned fast and get their muscles working, slaved to the brutish rhythms. Even when they’re not slamming, Necrambulant always dependably work in beefy grooves.
On the other hand, the songs also include counter-groove spasms of freakish, abrasively churning or feverishly feeding fretwork mania, berserk and eviscerating in their impact, as well gruesomely oppressive lurches in the slow lane, and surreal, choking, sonic miasmas of blood-congealing horror.
And that’s part of what will keep listeners on their toes during these songs. Necrambulant constantly switch up the tempos, the riffage, and their variable visions of things monstrous, macabre, maniacal, and repulsive. And there’s just no overstating the compulsive appeal of the music’s bone-smashing groovesomeness.
You might come out of this with your IQ cut in half, but if you’re like me you’ll also have a big stupid smile on your face, because these people are very good at what they’ve chosen to do. They can get pulse-rates racing and heads pumping. They’re beastly but also nimble. And they don’t wear out their welcome — the song lengths and album length are just right, long enough to take over but not so long that you might yell, “Enough! I must leave now!”
Will the album appeal to denizens of extreme metal realms outside of brutal death and slam? All I know is that it appealed to me. I found it insidiously infectious, and a different kind of palate cleanser and mental re-set in the midst of all the other kinds of things I normally listen to. Whether that will have a similar effect for you is a question you can now answer for yourselves:
We should also include the band’s own comments about the album:
“This new album is just a relentless barrage of slamming brutal death metal. We strived for a no-bullshit / no-filler tracklist that will just pummel the listener with heaviness. We spent the past two years working on fine-tuning these songs to be a proper representation of our original moniker of “Inhuman Slam Grind”. We hope this new album is something that fans of our earlier material will appreciate and something fresh for the newer fans as well. Expect a full audial assault of horror, gore, and guttural slamming sickness the Necrambulant way.”
The album was produced by Necrambulant, and Xander Bridge mixed and mastered it. The thoroughly hideous cover art is the work of Nev (Gruesome Graphx).
Gore House Productions recommends it for fans of Devourment, Kraanium, Cephalotripsy, Cannibal Corpse, and Abominable Putridity. As noted, it will be released tomorrow — and it’s available for pre-order now.
As a bonus, we’re also including the videos that Necrambulant have released in the run-up to the album’s release.
PRE-ORDER:
https://gorehouseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/upheaval-of-malignant-necrambulance
https://gorehouseproductions.com/
NECRAMBULANT:
https://www.facebook.com/necrambulantaz/
https://www.instagram.com/necrambulant