Like other bands around the globe, Formless Oedon from the Philippines came to life in time to release their first recording (the Deathless Luminosity EP) just as the world began to be consumed by the ravages of covid in March 2020. Fortunately, the EP still made an impression among fans of death metal, and particularly those with a hungering for the old-school filth of the Finnish tradition.
Even more fortunately, the pandemic and its lockdowns didn’t snuff out the creative fires of this band, and they managed to record a debut album named Streams of Rot that’s now set for release on July 24th by the Memento Mori label. As a sign of what’s coming, today we premiere the album’s second advance track, “Calcine Purification“.
Sometimes we can’t resist the urge to try to figure out the genesis of a band’s name, particularly when it’s suggestive but not obvious, as in this case. Well, maybe it would be obvious to players of Bloodborne, because our researching tells us that Oedon is a “Great One” mentioned throughout Bloodborne but never seen, perhaps because he somehow managed to ascend to an even higher plane than the rest of his eldritch godlike race, resulting in Oedon never having to take a physical form.
Consistent with these speculations about the band’s name, there is a menacing and eldritch quality in “Calcine Purification“. The rapidly vibrating and skittering riffs sound pernicious and difficult to resist, unearthly and malign, and the vocals are authentically monstrous and malevolent. In addition, the riffs flare in signs of imperious but poisonous grandeur; even the soloing seems haughty, in addition to sounding supernatural in its frenzied yet chilling ecstasies.
The song is also a punishing, thanks to ruthlessly hammering and fanatically battering drums and the subterranean tumult of the bass lines. It drives hard and fast, punches with power, and revels in its vicious frenzies.
Yet before it’s over, the song also becomes even more unnerving. When the pace slows and the drums drop like bombs, the guitars trill in excruciating agony, filling the mind with visions of purulent disease and feverish pain — interspersed with bursts of brutal jackhammering trauma that will give necks a vigorous workout. And as pestilential and depraved as the riffing often sounds, it turns out to be infectious in the other sense of the word too.
In addition to providing our own demented ramblings we can’t resist the urge to borrow words from the PR materials from the album, not just because they’re vividly evocative but also because they’re accurate: “Form meeting content, Streams of Rot is a festering sore of old-school filth in the Finnish tradition: lumbering but volatile, dripping with slime yet exactingly executed, and utterly world-eating no matter the tempo.”
For more info about this macabre, mutilating, and perversely mesmerizing debut album, check the links below — and then be sure to listen to the record’s first advance track, “Heavenly Abomination“, just in case your blood hasn’t already been thoroughly quickened and congealed by the song we’re just presented.
By turns, that one is sickening and morbid, dragging and decayed, ferociously violent and freakishly preternatural, and doomed beyond even the faintest sign of hope. It is indeed a death metal abomination, and a damned addictive one.
MEMENTO MORI:
http://www.memento-mori.es/
https://www.facebook.com/memento.mori.label
FORMLESS OEDON:
https://www.facebook.com/formlessoedon
https://formlessoedon.bandcamp.com