ALBUM REVIEW: Cerebral Purgatory – Resin Tomb
Transcending Obscurity Records have certainly built quite the case for being the best extreme metal label around in recent years. Death metal, black metal, grindcore, sludge… they’ve got all those bases covered, sometimes even all at once as is essentially the case with this debut full-length from Australia’s RESIN TOMB.
Given the ingredients mentioned there should be no prizes for guessing that Cerebral Purgatory is hard work. It’s not even half an hour long – bang on 29 minutes in fact – and yet to enter its world is to give yourself over to all manner of bewildering blast beats, suffocating sludge, and constant contorting dissonance. It can be hard to know where you are in at all, and indeed what the band are going to do next, but those with a certain appetite for the kind of music that feels a bit like eating wasps and cement may well have just found their new favourite dish.
Even those who do find some kind of satisfaction in this sort of thing will still need several attentive listens before they can disentangle the madness. Cerebral Purgatory comprises eight tracks and none of them are interested in anything less than nauseating intensity; even the relative break in the onslaught provided by the first half of the title track is still dark and jagged and menacing, and while others like Human Confetti and Concrete Crypt may allow themselves a few seconds of a lonely dissonant guitar line or a bit of an ominous intro the inevitability of the violence to follow and the swiftness with which it tends to arrive ensures that none of these moments ever really feel like respite.
Really though, Cerebral Purgatory is one of those records that is ‘enjoyed’ or at least digested far better if you just allow yourself to succumb to it rather than spend too much energy trying to anticipate its every sadistic twist and turn. It can even be quite hypnotic in its extremity, as is the case in the sheer terrifying heft of the second half of third track Scalded, for example, or the MASTODON-esque wind to the guitar work in Purge Fluid later on, with the immersion helped all the more by the thick and enveloping mix courtesy of the band’s guitarist Brendan Auld.
High marks are also somewhat predictably awarded to drummer Perry Vedelago, mainly for the relentlessness with which he drives the record forward, while vocalist Matt Budge impresses with a range that encompasses piercing, tortured shrieks, forceful bellows, and some killer ugly gutturals that come powerfully to the fore in tracks like Flesh Brick and the aforementioned Scalded. Every member plays a crucial part though, the buzzy low-end rumble of bassist Mitch Long essential in maintaining the record’s suffocating presence, while the chunky riffing and angular interweaving of the aforementioned Auld and second guitarist Matt Gordon leave arguably the album’s most lasting fingerprints.
Ultimately the most impressive thing about Cerebral Purgatory is how it manages to be both free and cohesive at the same time. It pulls from plenty of different places but it never resorts to just doing one track in one style and then another in a different style, instead leaving a clear and lasting impression as a whole even if it may take a while longer for specific moments to stay with you.
Rating: 7/10
Cerebral Purgatory is set for release on January 19th via Transcending Obscurity Records.
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