(On April 11th the German destroyers in Cytotoxin independently released their new album Biographyte. For our friend Professor D. Grover the XIIIth it was one of his most eagerly anticipated albums of the year, and now we have his review of it.)
Finally, it is here. Rejoice!
Greetings and salutations, friends. My early exposures to Cytotoxin generally revolved around me hearing the early moments of the Gammageddon album, with its overwhelming flurry of guitar notes and pig-squeal vocals, just enough for me to decide that this sort of brutal tech probably wasn’t my kind of thing. It wasn’t until I dove into 2020’s Nuklearth, an album that sanded down a lot of brutal death metal’s rough edges, that Cytotoxin really clicked for me, and while it finished fourth on my year-end list for 2020 (a fascinating read four years later, and one that would likely undergo some restructuring with current hindsight), in the years that have followed it’s easily the album from that year that I’ve listened to the most.
My initial misgivings with brutal death metal stemmed from the more over-the-top elements of the subgenre: the ridiculousness of the ultra-low guttural or pig-squeal vocals, the pinging snare drums and rough mixes in general, the gratuitously violent and sometimes misogynistic art and lyrics. Nuklearth had basically none of these, but still married brutality with tech-death precision into something not quite like anything else I had heard. From there I branched out, starting with the rest of the Cytotoxin discography, then to adjacent bands like Katalepsy, Benighted, Unfathomable Ruination, and Analepsy. I still avoid most of the genre, but my horizons have broadened anyway. Continue reading »
