AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: NEURECTOMY — “OVERWROUGHT”

(Our old friend Austin Weber again returns to NCS, and this time he’s introducing our premiere of a new album by the technical/brutal death metal band Neurectomy.)

In the immortal words of Twin Peaks: “That gum you like is going to come back in style.”

Outside of the overwhelming and well-warranted love Archspire has garnered in the scene, technical brutal death metal that both leans into and focuses on extreme shredding, chaotic tempo shifts, and is just all-in on not giving a damn about being “listenable” has largely gone out of style.

And again, I know/love Archspire, and technically, Archspire is still sort of doing this, as is Origin, but overall this type of sound is sort of a now-lost sub-genre within technical brutal death metal. For a while there, it was a very active style thanks to Viraemia, Beneath The Massacre, Anomalous, Brain Drill, and countless others.

You can call it (and often this label holds true) riff-salad-focused hyper-shred “wankery” all you want if you dislike it, but to me, and many others, there remains something special about this style due to how unpredictable it is and how close it seems to going off the rails at any given moment. It’s a real adrenaline rush, and if I’m being frank, I just love stuff that’s absurd as heck!

But within this particular paradigm that now feels like a lost relic: we’re here to talk about two bands that truly said a lot with a little and directly inspired what you’re about to hear below on Overwrought by Neurectomy: Viraemia and Psyopus. I guess if this were a movie, much of what you’re about to hear could be called “fan service” material, but thankfully the music on Overwrought encompasses much more than just sounding like those two groups alone. However, those twin influences do help this one stand out and make it much more exciting in my view.

I also hear a fair bit of Brain Drill, Beneath The Massacre, Dying Fetus, and Origin in the songs here as well. And I’m not bringing up Origin just because their killer drummer, John Longstreth, drums on this, but thankfully, the Origin influence is sort of kept to a minimum; otherwise, it might feel more like a clone act than a band trying to achieve their own sound.

The two main members, Joe and Kris, both doing guitar/vox (not sure who tracked bass guitar but I’m assuming it was one of them), chose to remain quasi-anonymous and only use their first names here, but both of them have delivered a jaw-dropping display of sick guitar work that at times reminds me of what Killitorous is up to when it comes to what these projects sound like as a whole. It goes without saying, but John puts on another tour de force whirlwind drum performance here that is worth the price of admission alone.

My only real complaint is that I wish more of the songs had defined structures that differentiated them from the other songs. They’re all different, and some are noticeably different enough to stand out from other tracks, but they’re all composed of 30-second to 1-minute in-length sections (give or take, but it’s close to that range on average) that then transition either smoothly or chaotically to either extreme brutality or a vortex of wild tapping/sweeping-led ideas over and over back and forth between the two worlds in a ping-pong sort of manner. So even as a hardcore fan of chaotic nonsense, a bit more structure would go a long way to giving each song an identity of its own.

However, if you’re willing to engage with this release as it is, there’s so much to love here that it becomes a small complaint at best. For all I know, going the uber-chaotic route with very little repetition of ideas was a very purposeful thing, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

This release is oodles of noodles and then some, yet it’s still quite a brutal affair, and there is a lot of raw, lacerating, pure death metal riffage in the brutal death metal vein going on despite it being a shred-heavy affair. Put simply, Overwrought is a highly ambitious and near-impenetrable maze-like effort requiring a lot of time to unlock everything it has to offer within its swift 32-minute runtime spread across 8 devastating tracks. I can only see Neurectomy getting better if they continue making music.

I wouldn’t be helping with this album stream premiere if I didn’t believe it was something special. Neurectomy – Overwrought is the real deal, and it drops this Friday, November 17th. You can buy/pre-save the release via Bandcamp (*I’m not sure why pre-orders aren’t live yet on BC, but check the link above later?) and Spotify and of course, make sure to follow them over on Facebook and Instagram.