ALBUM REVIEW: Paralytic Love – Cave Moth
Noisy oddballs CAVE MOTH have been playing their intoxicating blend of math, hardcore, grind and death metal for a decade now and have released a grocery list of EPs, splits and albums. Always interesting and uncompromising, the band have flexed and evolved over the years with line-up changes, hiatuses, videography and performance art, and taking in jazz and noise influences to push their sound even further.
Now, with Paralytic Love, the band show once again just how abrasive the extreme reaches of metal can be. Written about the troubling nature of our present and the looming threat of our future, there’s something frantic and urgent about it all, as if there’s no time to say what they want to say. As such, Carpe Diem feels like the perfect opener in name and practice. Bursting to life with the crashing of a thousand waves, the trio (vocalist Dan Wolfson, bassist Fred O’Leary and guitarist/drum programmer Daniel Quinn) thrash and contort relentlessly as if they’re trying to break through the speakers and throttle you with their instruments.
Theseus follows with a tone thicker than bitumen and buries you beneath that molten pitch until it fills every nook and cranny of your being. Fault Of Charlatans possesses a similarly disgusting heft, woven in amongst serrated lines of technical guitar work. Throughout it all, Wolfson barks, bellows and blusters a venomous verse in a performance that is as encapsulating as it is terrifying, and the total product elicits a fair few jaw droppings with its magnificent ability to crush and deconstruct.
Paralytic Love lasts just 469 seconds. That’s not even eight minutes. On average, that’s less than a minute per track. But rather than being a real ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ affair, CAVE MOTH have crammed so much into every moment that these seven minutes and 49 seconds give more than albums that are three, four and five times the length. With such a bitesize stature, there’s a replayability that is sometimes missing from grind-leaning releases – but that’s not to say it makes for easy listening.
Even at the top end of the scale, Aghast Optic is just 90 seconds long – one of just three tracks to run longer than a minute. Paralytic Love is a vortex of fury; a terrible whirlpool that sucks you down and violently tosses you about under the surface. Every now and then you get a sense of which way is up, but before you can propel yourself toward air, you’re dragged back down again for another ruinous spin cycle.
Rather than serving you a heaped plate of barbaric malice, CAVE MOTH provide artfully arranged little helpings that leave even more of an impression because of the experience. What we’re saying is, Paralytic Love is the newest Michelin-starred restaurant of the deathgrind/mathcore realm. Book your table as soon as possible.
Rating: 8/10
Paralytic Love is set for release on April 14th via self-release.
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