Album Review: Cryptworm - Spewing Mephitic Putridity
Reviewed by Sam Jones
Usually when we consider death metal that’s rather cavernous we often jump straight to the US. This time round its not the case, as the UK’s Cryptworm demonstrate. Arguably the first band I’ve heard to play this variation of death metal from the UK since Cruciamentum, Cryptworm have been an extremely recent discovery having only learnt of this record about a fortnight gone. Formed in 2014 out of Bristol, UK, the band have actually been quite active over the years having released a Demo or Split or EP every year going since 2017. Now at last, we have their debut full length record nearly at out fingertips and so it's time to see what such a band can give us after so many years amongst the Underground and niche releases and corners of death metal. This is the aptly titled Spewing Mephitic Putridity.
I like the sheer lack of introduction to this record: there’s no ambient opening, no atmospheric piece to ease the audience in. The moment you press play you’re subjected to the band’s gargling and repulsive vision for what they wanted this album to be perceived as. It’s this ugly and boiling excretion that quickly finds its way up to your nose and then stays there, giving you just enough room to breathe uncomfortably. The production applied herein is one of a scathing, coherent yet miasmic quality where we can nicely make out where the band are taking us all the while, bombarded by a hideous soundscape that would see our skin melt and tenderise like battered mutton. Since this is the case we must also give praise to the mix where each of the vocal and instrumental elements have been fine tuned and balanced well enough to ensure the full band get their equal time to shine. It’s a rather well rounded out record in that respect, even though the instrumentation and vocals have zero intention of immediately presenting themselves as anything close to “precise” or “methodical”. It’s ugly death metal done right.
When it comes to the vocals you may as well just give up now on trying to understand what’s being said. This is the kind of album that has no precognitions of being understood or examined for its lyrical quality, at least not throughout the record’s first listen. Lyrics are always there and available for curious listeners to search for, but that isn’t the priority the band have applied for their vocals when the metal is flying. Much like the riffs and soundscape, the vocals are as nasty and putrefying as their cover art would equally demonstrate. Listening to this record is the equivalent of feeling your bone density dissipate into dust and the vocals are the face of that sensation. But I appreciated how the vocals are as crushing and guttural as they are on record and yet, they’re not some grand burden for us to bare. I was able to competently listen to this record without feeling like I needed to take a break from time to time owing to the vocal’s weight. The vocals perform with precisely the impact you’d want from such an album however, the band don’t fall into the common pitfall whereby the vocals are unbearably heavy in the mix. It’s handled pretty effectively.
It’s not all things speed with this record. While the band never really take off into breakneck paces with this record, preferring to keep things at a median tempo, they also recognise the necessity of breaking the flow of songwriting time and again. You’ll be listening to the riffs progress before it ends suddenly, reinforced by a slower and more macabre riff piece that brings in a creeping and malevolent tone to its performance. It’s also great to see the band do this pretty early on in the album’s running too, emphasising to audiences that this hopefully isn’t the only time we’ll pick up on it considering, we still have the majority of the album to go yet. But by keeping the majority of their record to a steady tempo, the band ensure audiences can follow along to what is being played pretty easily. As a result, audiences become more immersed and therefore the band’s atmosphere is even more sickly and repugnant because we’re not being forced along. Audiences are allowed to feel the grime and repulsion the band have embedded within their songwriting.
There’s a real absence of blast beats throughout this record. The drums do attain a good level of speed however the drumming never reaches the intensities that blast beats may provide. I think the reasoning behind this has been to keep audience’s attention on the band’s performance on the whole, if blast beats were thrown into the mix then it’d another element that could drag their attention away from the overall soundscape and onto a specific quality. With that said however the drums themselves have this compact and raw tone to their strike, blast beats were never necessary to begin with seeing how each strike of the Tom-toms garners our attention. When the pace does quicken the drums are dominant and provide a crashing aesthetic. Yet, the drums aren’t as cohesive as one may initially think. What continued to draw me in to the drumming is how unrefined it is, not merely in tone but in songwriting. There are occasions where the drums assume this lashing and schizophrenic quality whereby you’ll hear one form of drumming that’s then immediately interspersed with sudden cymbal strikes and bass strikes and these all come, without warning or any signal through the band’s performance. The overall album may have this somewhat collective performance going on, but the drums really deliver on the more chaotic and frenetic energies you’d like to hear from such a band.
In conclusion, this is arguably the first of the dirtier and more repugnant records that we’ve found this year. While Cryptworm straight up don’t reinvent the wheel with their debut full length release, they managed to craft a record that’s very tightly put together and infuses competent and unpredictable songwriting with gross soundscapes that help to further our immersion while we’re listening. The vocals are not anything you haven’t heard before, but they don’t need to be anything new when they’re mixed in just effectively enough to be the vocals you’d want to experience throughout such an album. Looking back, there’s a real absence of guitar solos and much like the lack of traditional blast beats it enables us to dive deeper into what the album is really here to provide: an 8-track record that doesn’t run for very long yet offers everything you’d want to find within. This was well made and I’d certainly be interested to see what else Cryptworm have in store for us in the near future.
