Album Review: Castrator - Coronation of the Grotesque
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
I’ve listened to enough blatantly misogynistic death metal albums over the years to know that I’m on thin ice with a lot of women’s rights groups, but there are also a few albums I’ve heard that make me think I’m probably not getting into heaven either. I can picture myself at the pearly gates, shrugging sheepishly as St. Peter glances over my Spotify listens, cocks an eyebrow, and boots me down to Hades’ maw agape below. It’s not the easiest thing to avoid; so much of the nascent brutal death and goregrind scene adopted such rabid animosity towards women that to even dip a solitary limb into it was to draw back a stump festooned with woman-hating sludge. You wound up bearing witness to a sort of sexism arms race, each band determined to push the envelope further than the last, losing any remaining shock value – and with it the last strands of a threadbare, gossamer veneer of “artistic merit” – in a wave of mounting crass but otherwise indistinguishable dreck. Castrator are, I imagine, aware of all this; and in truly metal style, they are here to even the score. But concept is nothing without execution. Noble aims are well and good, but with the best will in the world, they’ll render no salvation if the release is otherwise substandard. With that in mind, how is their work to consume?
It feels... amalgamative. It’s influences are made very clear very quickly – the royalty of classic American death. Fertile soils indeed, the produce of which comes to resemble something of a buffet with blastbeats – a serving of Leprosy-era Death over here, a splash of chunky Suffocation slams over there, perhaps a handful of Morbid Angel to garnish. The desolate abandon of Immolation within the disconsolate leads of “I am Eunch” weaves hellfire into it’s sheet music, whereas the state-of-emergency pit riot hardcore riffs of Dying Fetus turn “Deviant Miscreant” into an actively combusting incendiary grenade of a song. I catch the warmonger genealogy of Deeds of Flesh in the latter half of the release, in particular the tremelo patterns and the way they link into more rotund, low-end riffage. Listen to “Discordant Rumination” for example, then avail yourself of Deed’s masterly “Reduced to Ashes” album; you’ll hear the resemblance. If you like any of the aforementioned bands, then chances are that you’ll also strike gold with Castrator. Yet hold; for while it’s a definite strength of Castrator’s that they can ablate these grade-A riffs from the discographies of their influences while also knitting them seamlessly in union, there’s also a seed of… if not weakness, then perhaps an anchor on their potential. To the extent that all creative endeavour is a product of it’s influences, Castrator are content to wear theirs very proudly on their sleeves, and while all aspects of “Coronation of the Grotesque” surge with supreme confidence and competence, there is the sense of the album being a bit of a jigsaw. Don’t misunderstand; it’s not that anything sticks so much as a trepidatious fingertip into the tepid waters of mediocrity, so much as nothing – in terms of how the album sounds – springs forth and screams “Castrator” at you (presumably while waving a blood-encrusted brick towards your crotch). I find myself sat here, mulling over words to the effect of “Man, what a killer Death riff that was!” – but rarely did I find myself latching onto any specific sonic motif that felt, uniquely and indelibly, Castrator’s alone.
Yet, there is something that does differentiate them. It’s difficult to engage with in a sense – the issue is that the band is entirely female, which is something of a comparative rarity in the extreme metal scene; exceptions do exist (Crypta for one other example) but metal is to a large degree a sausage fest. Go to any random gig and the balls-to-halls ratio will be skewed wildly in favour of the male side of things. It’s here that there’s a tightrope set taut and perilous for me o’er canyon floors lost to the eye miles below. I’d sooner not devolve into giving some insipid “Man’s take” on Feminist discourse around gender politics in heavy metal, and nor do I want to diminish the band’s achievements by straddling my high horse and championing the album solely on the basis of the sex of the lineup. The band themselves might even find it somewhat exasperating that a review, by a guy, ostensibly about music, sees fit to yank the brake and warble on about women in metal as though I’m an authority. Fine; to speak plainly for half a heartbeat then: This is a really good album wholly on the merits of the music alone, and you should fucking buy it.
In a world full of dong-bearing death metal bands, it’s good to have some groups that, thematically, can come at their material from an angle no less unsavoury than their masculine counterparts but fresher, less overdone, and less wedded to the mire of anti-feminine sentiment that – especially with brutal death – the scene has been content to wallow in over days past. The always-worth-reading Kim Kelly (former scribe of the dearly departed Terrorizer magazine) once penned an article in which she outlined the way in which she had found herself attracted to the caustic strains of the music itself, while simultaneously being repulsed by the sheer prevalence of anti-female content within it. She recalled speaking to artists who made frequent use of such material and was as often as not confronted with the attempted rebuttal that the material wasn’t intended to be taken seriously. Her concerns don’t precisely mirror but certainly compliment similar discourse I’ve read floating around the extreme horror literature community. Again, regular as clockwork, came the passing shot at a retort: it’s not supposed to be taken seriously, and - more insidiously – you’re oversensitive if it does bother you. The sheer quantity of bands that resort to these same tired tropes does suggest that, beyond attempts to shock, some bands genuinely do hold these disparaging attitudes towards women and duck behind the ever-slight veil of artistic intent by way of dodging any serious analysis of why these themes are so ubiquitous. It’s all well and good to say that it is, ultimately, for a laugh, but what does it say when everyone is telling the same joke? Perhaps violently gynophobic content wouldn’t be such a big deal if it were counterbalanced by an equivalent deluge of equally virulent misandrist death metal. But it isn’t. There seems to be no female mirror universe version of Devourment, with their own unapologetically confrontational gender-flipped version of, say, “Babykiller” (at least that I know of). In that context, even if Castrator did suck (which they emphatically do not) there would still be ample value to their presence simply existing in the space they occupy, as an all-woman band in a predominantly male space.
Thematically at least then, I think that Castrator have that individual edge that their music could do with more of. And realistically, you don’t have to go off on some lengthy tangent about gender politics in death metal when the cold fact of it is that “Coronation of the Grotesque” slays, irrespective of the viewpoints it adopts. It wouldn’t be difficult to sit back, huffing the earthy bouquet of my own farts, and dismiss it as too much a compiled hodgepodge of simulacra, a gestalt entity wrought of its predecessors’ vestigial limbs more than anything specific to itself. But that doesn’t take any more than a mean streak and a cynical refusal to countenance work on its own merits. Yes, the bouncy, ascending single note riffs of “Blood Bind’s Curse” smack of Deicide, but do those same riffs not kill regardless? Yes, the sliding powerchord massacre of “Fragments of Defiance” has more than touch of Terrorizer about it; it rules nonetheless. The sole thing I’m not wild about is the “Metal Command” cover they do – it loses the mad dynamics of Paul Baloff’s wild, catastrophically inebriated bark and the down-tuning makes it seem more sluggish than it should be – but that’s a mere scuffed facet on the capstone of the album. So if your tastes encompass the American school of death metal, you will feast well at the offering here served - especially if your collection just cannot withstand having any more penises in it.
