Two from Relapse

Origin Echoes of Decimation Relapse 6637

Cephalic Carnage Anomalies Relapse 6638

http://www.relapse.com/

Most fans of advanced, often experimental metal (however flimsy the term is as a genre-marker these days) are aware that Relapse is one of the flagship labels out there. These two releases confirm the good ship Relapse’s commitment to challenging, in-your-face, even overwhelming stuff. In the great heartland between the coasts lie desolate expanses of plains and prairies. What’s an angry young’un to do out there? Shred, baby.

Kansas has actually produced a fair number of heavy bands over the years, most notably the mighty Coalesce and their offspring (The Esoteric’s debut full-length is set to drop this spring). But thrash/death maestros Origin are distinct. Featuring insanely fast blast-beats, complex skirling guitar lines, and multiple vocal attacks (from the sub-guttural Cookie Monster growls to the demonic shriek, most courtesy of primary vocalist James Lee), the band blaze through nine songs in under 30 minutes, each replete with breakdowns, texture and time changes, and so forth. The worldview is somewhat predictably bleak too, from the demonic face staring at you from the cosmos on the cover to the track titles (“Debased Humanity” or “Staring from the Abyss,” for example).

It’s brutal, unwavering, technically jaw-dropping stuff. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine anything tighter, more complex, or more punishing than this; one exposure to “Amoeba” – with Paul Ryan’s and Clint Appelhanz’s guitar spasms and James King’s ridiculous blastbeat drumming – should confirm this. And compared with Origin’s earlier stuff, and with a lot of monochromatic death metal releases out there, these tunes actually do have considerable harmonic complexity and musical nuance for those attuned to this kind of stuff. But somehow it just doesn’t get the old head banging so much. Curiously unmoving but certainly worth listening to.

Cephalic Carnage, on the other hand, is as quirky and complex as it gets. The self-styled practitioners of “Rocky Mountain Hydrogrind” have taken the basic materials of death/grindcore – scary chops, scary vocals, presto-chango tunes – and filtered them through a unique combination of tongue-in-cheek satire, Butthole Surfers-esque perversions, and the occasional jazz fusion spasm. From the two-dozen-and-counting tunes on Exploiting Dysfunction to the epic sprawls and doomy menace of Lucid Interval to this brand new disc, the Denver quintet (who prefer to be listed simply as Len, Steve, Jawsh, Zac, and John) has proven nothing if not unpredictable and challenging. Things start of promisingly with the opening “Scientific Remote Viewing,” a memorably pummeling track that swandives from lightning fast shred sections into murky dungeons.

But by the time the band is into “Wraith,” it’s pretty apparent that Cephalic have tweaked their sound again, this time with some Dillinger-esque twin guitar breaks (of the wiggy, post-Zappa variety that are heard so often on Miss Machine). It’s not demonstrative, it’s incorporated pretty smoothly into their overall sound (which, make no mistake, remains painful enough to please hardcore fans); but it’s a testament to the breadth of their listening and their growth as a band. There is a demerit to this disc, though. At times, however, the parodism that has often characterized their music gets a bit too heavy-handed, as on the black metal stylings of “The Will or the Way” or the emocore goof “Dying Will Be the Death of Me.” And there’s something about the prog-fusion insanity of “Inside is Out” that doesn’t convince as much as earlier experiments in this vein. But overall, Cephalic remains at the top of experimental metal.

~ Jason Bivins