Album Review: Dead and Dripping - Nefarious Scintillations
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
I reviewed an album by Vulnificus a few short months ago, and listening to Dead and Dripping, I found myself sort of comparing them. There felt to be a few points of similarity, which made all the sense it needed to when I realized that this is the solo project of Vulnificus’ axewielder. If Vulnificus had a few notable maladaptations in the lugubrious mix of their own release that helped them stand out among their peers, then Dead and Dripping feels like Evan Daniele (the aforementioned axeman) taking a brutal death template and going full on bugfuck nuts with it.
Time signatures warp around the malefic twanging writhe of a bass with an unusual, if much appreciated, presence in the mix that sees it take command of the melody (if it could be referred to that way) as much as might be expected of the guitars themselves. Chords bend and lurch, fits of finger-snapping atonal runs the length and breadth of the fretboard (“Spontaneous Recollections of Unwitnessable Atroctiy” for example) mark it to be offspring of Disgorge’s worshipped lineage, yet the fledging fled the nest the second it’s plumage could bear it. This thing feels as much the scion of free-jazz unpredictability as it does the sunbaked marauder upon the dunes of Nile’s own adventures through the Egyptian crypts. The musicianship is a thing of repulsive beauty, technical to an extent that defies easy description and has me scratching what little remains of my hairline off in deep bafflement as to how the fuck anyone writes this stuff. It’s steeped in esoteric psychedelia; not content with purely corporeal terrors, this reaches for the extradimensional ones too. Some of these melodic progressions feel like the sorts of passages you’d more generally hear plucked out on a sitar while a set of unwashed flower children sit on a carpet and wax lyrical about peace, love, and the virtues of marijuana consumption. Except that here, the psychedelia hails from a much more stridently sinister caste – the bong rip was too deep, the weed an unholy vintage, and now the hippies claw valleys through their eyeballs to spare themselves sight of leering gods in realms unglimpsed by the frail psyche of man.
The obvious nod to gods of the great white north Cryptopsy forms a reference point, but Dead and Dripping (“DAD” from this point on) brandish a sound far more distinct than the homage their name might imply. There’s whispers of Cryptopsy’s supremacy, sure – but it mixes in with fruits of other lineages, like the traumatic acid-trip slam of Dripping for instance. It seems to yawn – not lazily, but more like the awakening gape of a formerly slumbering pandaemonic intelligence we have been foolish enough to stir wakeful. Clearly the product of a mind as gifted as it is diseased, the drumming is this preternatural display of agility, flipping between grooves, blasts and fills with cephalopod flexibility. As much is clear from the opening track alone – “Nefariously Scintillating Through Vacant Galactic Reservoirs” hurtles through the stanzas of it’s birthing pains, it’s introductory riff scrabbles like a dropped bucket of tarantulas, moving to a solid OSDM riff that might threaten to be a bit on the typical side were it not for a curious higher accent that crests the second half of the riff. At 1.57 it takes a simple but speedy riff and shapes a variety of suffixes onto it that mould a good but predictable riff into something far more engaging for the unforeseeable twists it takes. Slams hack away with the taut tendon-snap of the bass at 03.21, and then, and then, and then…is it obvious yet? The way the album tears wet handfuls from the corpsepile of good brutal death and forms them into something all it’s own, familiar yet progressive and impossibly interesting for it? Even the vocals have a fun flip of the formula – one (not wholly unfair) criticism I often see lobbed at brutal death is the homogeneity of it’s vocal approach. But here, the usual armoury of brees and gurgles is swapped out for the unspeakably nasty croak of some swamp-bound toad god. It feels like the sort of voice Tutankhamun would’ve had telling us to turn the fucking lights off when we yank the lid off his sarcophagus after some 3000 years stuffed under a pyramid.
There’s so much of it, so many riffs intertwining and separating within so little space of each other, with so much density to it all. It’s a wonder it retains any sense of unity at all, but somehow there’s a momentum and a sense of progression utterly enthralling in itself. “An Utterly Tenantless World of Aeons-Long Death” is 7 and a half minutes long – a potential eternity for a genre as concerned with the horrifying immediacy of extreme violence as brutal death is. But DAD hurdle this snag as though it’s not even there - it’s solo crescendos and wails about a prism splitting it’s drum fills into infinite varying shades, all above the churning grind of a menacing atonal slam riff. It feels as though it could not have ended any other way. It pulls uncountable strings and threads together and weaves from them a tapestry sodden and gorged with celestial vitae. Riveting and chameleonic, you catch snatched visions through ragged portals at sections the titans of the genre might have written – Deeds of Flesh and their potent brand of brutal death prove a stern father to the kaleidoscopic turmoil of “Horrifying Glimpses into Inconceivably Demented Cityscapes”, the way the blastbeats thunder along with the chromatic sections of the riff only to pause or use a fill to accentuate pinch harmonics or slams that erupt at unpredictable intervals, giving the whole song this jagged, dangerous progression.
In case it isn’t obvious I am deeply – possibly problematically - in love with this thing. It’s one of those goldilocks brutal death albums that nails the sort of tunnel-dweller skittering technicality that that makes outfits like Disgorge or Defeated Sanity so compelling while the charcoal membranes of it’s wings fan out to unexpected, progressive spaces that boost it soaring over the competition. It’s raw and rough in sound, but never so much that it begins compromising legibility. Almost absurdly technical - it scored immediate points just for the lone fact that it has solos – it nonetheless wraps this frenetic string mangling into a coherent package that feels like it takes the paths less trodden yet still gets from A to B in ways that make sense. It’s written with a supreme grip on the mechanics of the genre, knowing with nanosecond precision when best to confound your expectations and when to slam your skull off the concrete. I’m fighting myself to avoid descending into an unlovable tangle of purple prose in relentless praise of this thing – if brevity is the soul of wit then I am the dullest motherfucker alive after all – but it’s such a pleasure to have an album that feels so very worthy of all the effusive praise I can heap upon it. It comes out on the 28th November, and every second you spend without it in your collection past this point is another second your collection is woefully incomplete.
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