Album Review: Pulpit Vomit - Hospital Lens
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
The world needs more grindcore, Lithe embodiment of violence, rage insulated and magnified through years of pain dissatisfaction as it is. As with so many things, Brutal Truth really did nail it when they titled a live album “For the Ugly and Unwanted, This is Grindcore”. It’s music that speaks to the restless malcontent within all of us, music that says in blasts, distortion and screams what we cannot say in words. It's vital; irreplaceable. I could be the last man alive listening to it and it would be no less essential. And I say this in a year already thick with good grindcore; Type Armour Unit, Raw Addict, Feasting Neuropathy, Sulfuric Cautery... yet ever shall there be room for more. Where, then, do Pulpit Vomit slot into the grindcore landscape of 2025? Will they join the distinguished dispensations of their contemporaries, or do they fall by the wayside, lost in the shade of their superiors? Le'ts find out.
Any grind release worth its salt should feel like using a defibrillator for an alarm clock. You should feel like you close your eyes for a night of blissful slumber only to snap awake to a bucket of ice water and a man in a balaclava and army boots kicking you in the bollocks and demanding to know where you hid the silver. It appears that Pulpit Vomit were briefed on this ahead of time because they smash the rev counter into the red in a heartbeat with “Razor Jaw”, a song that feels not wholly dissimilar to exfoliating with a belt sander. The way they slow down for a blink’s worth of blunt chugs only to burst forth with maniacal stretches of blastbeats grants it the sort of mentally compromised belligerence common to some of the greats of the genre; Discordance Axis, Narcosis... kinfolk in and masters of scouring violence. It’s here, when the album is at it’s most frantic, it’s most visceral, that it’s at it’s best.
You might think that the short runtime of grind albums works as a little bit of a cheat code, so to speak. This one is a toe over sixteen minutes – that’s not a lot of space you need to fill, right? And in terms of pure minutes alone, you’d be right. But there are other considerations to be had here: firstly, grind can pack more into a quarter-hour than some albums quadruple it’s length, and secondly, a short duration leaves you absolutely no room to fuck about. A scintilla of filler is cause for concern when a single dud can swallow a tenth of the time you’ve got to play with. So Pulpit Vomit can’t let up; that same insatiable rage must persist throughout. Does it? Kinda-sorta. The untitled instrumental gets momentarily bogged down in some lacklustre chugging which struck me as a little uninteresting. Unfortunately, this is something of a repeat gripe – and considering the duration we have to work with here, the fact that the album leans as much as it does on those same breakdown sections begins to grate. Songs that are otherwise saturation bombardments of screeching animosity will, regular as clockwork, flop into these relatively lengthy sections of thumping away at the low strings - especially towards the latter half, when the reliance on chugging away feels as though it becomes more of a crutch.
Which isn’t to say things are terrible; “The Filth” pulls triplet riffs from the nastiest depths of Morbid Angel's discography to flay epidermal layers from you strip by strip, whereas “Midnight Nun” matches a delirious death/thrash affectation to a chorus with a disgusting bend to infest you with one of the most gurn-inducingly repugnant moments on the whole release. The vocal performance is a demented array of growls, gurgles, barks and squeals that never fails to maintain interest, and the schizophrenic switches in production from song to song stack dripping layers of repulsion atop one another. There is, within the space of sixteen minutes, a mass of joy for the discerning grind connoisseur to delight with; that it comes peppered with textures I’m less enthused about is unfortunate, but hey, nothing is perfect after all.
What I’m trying to say is that when Pulpit Vomit play fast they do it so well that I don’t want them to do anything else; variety is the spice of life however, and I would have been fine with the occasional breakdown hither and thither. They do overplay it, though even in my most contraband moments I’d have to concede that I found myself enjoying the album regardless. Whatever Pulpit Vomit do next, I can only hope that they forget that BPMs below four digits exist, and there is no finer nor more noble aim in life than, as patron saints of grind Nasum put it, “blasting shit to bits”. At sixteen minutes there’s little to lose by sampling it’s wares, and who knows? With any luck you, dear hypothetical crusty grind fanatic, will find it even more joyful than did I.
