ALBUM REVIEW: Deprecipice – Mastiff
Chances are if you’re reading this that you’re well aware of how irresponsibly heavy MASTIFF are by now. The Hull-based misery merchants’ 2021 full-length Leave Me The Ashes Of The Earth rather aptly left – as vocalist Jim Hodge put it to us – “quite a large crater really”, and now from those ashes the band emerge with its devastating follow-up Deprecipice. As the title promises though, this isn’t one of those rising phoenix scenarios – there’s no dawn after the darkness or anything like that – it doesn’t get better, there is no hope or light or catharsis here, only a fitting soundtrack to all that is bleak and broken and wrong in this world.
To be clear, all of that is meant as a compliment. MASTIFF’s concoction of metallic hardcore and sludge and a load of other extreme bits and pieces is genuinely staggering and you honestly might not hear a record that matches this one for sheer harrowing impact all year. It’s not a plastic heaviness, or even a purely sonic one, either; there’s a rawness and a bite and an urgency that you simply won’t find in a deathcore record that’s been produced to within an inch of its life, for example – this a product of the band’s insistence on writing live in the room and getting their ideas down as quickly as possible – and the weight of it all is only increased by Hodge’s apoplectic reflections on grief and mortality and the inescapable truth that all things must end.
With all this in mind, it is particularly impressive that Deprecipice never struggles for memorability – as was also the case for Leave Me The Ashes… before it. That is to say that it would be easy enough for an album like this just to bludgeon you into oblivion for 34 minutes and leave you with a general sense of having been thrown around a bit if not much else, but Deprecipice refuses to settle for that. Hodge’s vocals may be all screams and shouts and barks, but he is also insistent on being understood, happy to repeat simple ‘hooks’ like “We’re so close / To the fucking end” or “Hang them high / Let them rot” to ensure that they really burrow into the listener’s brain and in turn mark each track out as its own horrendous entity.
The music often achieves something similar, the heinous closing breakdown of second track Everything Is Ending and the ridiculous gurning heft of Pitiful towards the album’s end being two prime examples of the band at their most strikingly towering and terrifying. Elsewhere, fourth track Cut Throat leaves as much of a mark with something completely different, the band treading new ground in the form of a noisy industrial hellscape that provides the perfect backdrop for Ethan McCarthy of PRIMITIVE MAN to do all he can to shred his larynx over, while interlude and penultimate track The Shape opts for a quiet, slow-burning menace that proves particularly hard to shake – not least because its creeping melody returns in the album’s cataclysmic closer Thorn Trauma.
Ultimately though, it feels almost wrong to call anything on this record a ‘highlight’, not only because it’s all so insanely miserable, but also that doing so for any of the tracks mentioned would be to do a disservice to the equally outstanding quality of those left out. Deprecipice is a complete and all-encompassing descent into the void – a weight on your chest that simply won’t budge, a reminder both lyrically and sonically that nothing lasts and everything decays – and again, if you understand that all of that is meant as high praise indeed then you are probably looking at one of your favourite albums of the year here.
Rating: 9/10
Deprecipice is set for release on March 22nd via MNRK Heavy.
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