(On March 11th Transylvanian Recordings released a disgusting new album by Sacramento-based Tentacult. It’s fitting, therefore, that Sacramento-based NCS slave DGR is reviewing it today.)
Like any good proper umbrella genre that has absolutely exploded you can take the phrase “death metal” and draw ever finer concentric triangles from it into a pyramidic tower of subgenres with each sprouting two to three more lines from it until eventually you reach descriptors long enough that you run out of breath before you finish defining the sounds that make up a group.
By the end of it, you can construct a very pretty geometric structure of lines that’ll entrance your local social media “spiritual” influencer. At times it can be like trying to speed-read aloud a complicated dinner recipe in a single breath, your very last utterance of “blank-death metal” usually followed by the sound of you collapsing to the floor due to lack of oxygen and blood flow to the brain.
In layman’s terms though, you can often break down the view of death metal into four categories:
First: There is “death metal” – this is the polite recognition of a style of music that an artist has released. Too heavy for one, not bludgeoning enough for another. It is a blanket and matter-of-fact statement. You walk to the subgenre path from here into the world of the clinical, but overall, lowercase “death metal” is your basic catch-all. Too heavy for groove and not blast-heavy enough for grinding. We’re acknowledging that this is uglier than expected.
Second: There is “Death Metal” – here we have the purpose-built form. Artists are aiming to make this from moment one, dense as can possibly be and overwhelming at times. The capital “D” and “M” of Death Metal shows that an artist drew a marker on the ground and aimed to land there – parachute open or not – and that’s where they are now.
Third: There is “Death Metal” – This is brutality and violence. Even heavier than just the capital recognition of death metal as an artform, this is where the common conception of death metal lies. It is relentless and meant to be as overwhelming as possible at nearly all times. A lot of the classic bands became the bold form of death metal by virtue of being the original standard-bearers and vanguards. They get that extra bit of large font because they’ve earned it through years of toil and defining it by a thumbed-nose refusal to ever lighten up. Gloriously stupid when it wants to be and ever-overcomplicated at other times. We are the second form exponentially cranked up in bold here.
Finally: There is “Death metal” – This is the fetid, the fungal, the disgusting, and the gross. The emphasis here is on the rot and Death that comes with it. Walking through this music is like walking through loam. The ground squishes underneath your feet and gives off a small puff of gas each step of the way. We journey into abyssal form with this style of Death metal because the abyss is often in the ground. This is an empire built upon bodies and recorded to either sound as if its domain is in distant caves or underneath the dirt. The smell of sewage is common here. This makes sense though, right? No artform calling itself “Death Metal” was ever going to escape people trying to make music that sounds like actual death and post-mortem disintegration.
Given all of that, you’re now allowed to look at the cover art of Sacramento, California’s Tentacult and their new album Untamed Revulsion and, without hearing it, attempt to make a guess as to which of the four pathways laid out before you just now the band chose to follow. Assuming media literacy and reading comprehension aren’t completely… dead… we’ll hazard that you probably got it correct.
Untamed Revulsion will appeal heavily to those in the sewage-dwelling underground side of the death metal world because this is a release recorded to sound disgustingly old school. The riffwork on Tentacult‘s newest album is often primordial and sounds like the bubbling of an underground mud vent.
The tracklisting for Untamed Revulsion reveals much about Tentacult‘s ambitions as well, with the quest for the abyssic remaining heavily at the forefront at all times. Six songs managing to weigh out at thirty-five minutes worth of music translates into a block of this release being composed of some hefty, hefty boys. Basically, the flow of Untamed Revulsion crashes between two-modes. You’re either in the three-and-a-half minute block of music or the songs are in a psychotropic hallucination of six-plus minutes – or in the case of the closing number, well over nine.
Imagine then, songs constructed entirely of humongous-sounding guitar work and doomed-out bellowing for growls. It’s the old-school death metal style run through a modern-day filter to combine for a gnarled combination of outright ugliness. Tentacult are in the class of rotten death metal and they’re nailing what is left of its dessicated corpse to the wall pretty well here.
Thankfully, while the temptation to be permanently disgusting is ever-present in the musical realm that Tentacult are traversing on Untamed Revulsion, they’re willing to stretch their artistic muscles a bit. While things are never overwhelmingly complicated within these appropriately gigantic songs, the willingness to explore – even in the shorter three-and-a-half minute songs like “Geometry Of Shadows” – helps to keep things interesting. There’s a little bit of psychadelic doom influence in the band’s sound that seems to creep in at the edges of what they are doing, as if they were mutant hands slowly prying their way through a crack in an otherwise solid edifice.
It’s a sort of haunted experimentation that doesn’t quite work every time but does blend in well with Tentacult‘s attempted works of the grotesque. This is not something that was ever meant to be polished, so the songwriting flow of any particular movement occasional lumbering headfirst into a wall and drunkenly stumbling to the left works just as well as any sort of organic growth on forest floor.
It is impressive that Untamed Revulsion is only Tentacult‘s second album, for as much influence worship as may be present in the old-school death metal sphere, they’re already presenting themselves as doctors of the bizarre. Whatever left-field angle or odd direction you approach it from, Tentacult are either swimming in the waters of the macabre or the effluent of the dank and humid. Their style is one of rot and disgust to begin with, and so big, overwhelming riff work is the order of the day throughout. Long passages are where Tentacult seem to be at their best while they somewhat stealthily play in fields progressive, doom-y, and psychedelic.
Untamed Revulsion is an interesting splatter landing within the midst of a crowded March release schedule, yet if you’re the type forever digging in the uglier side of the death metal sphere and would appreciate something with a slobbering taste for slowly mind-melting exploration at times, Untamed Revulsion could be an album that will treat you well.
https://transylvanianrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/tentacult-untamed-revulsion
https://tentacult.bandcamp.com/