Album Review: Dysentery - Dejection Chrysalis
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Something that genuinely scared me was the realisation that I may not believe anything that I think I believe. How many times have I spoken hollow words from the heart, only to later know myself to have vomited doctrine in shambolic piecemeal pilfered from the mouths of men I deemed charismatic? A scratch below the surface would have shaven the gilt from the rot below. Yet I would swallow it all wouldn’t I? Trust is a character flaw now. I watch with rising alarm the flotsam from the American right wing and it’s unbecoming divorce from nuance and veracity wash ashore on my isle. I think back to my own tentative tip-toes around rabbit holes luck alone reeled me back from. What would I find myself yelling full-throated now had I traipsed a step closer then? What more is there to me, honestly held, that might dissolve under a second’s interrogation? I don’t know if I trust myself. We're all awash with axioms, afloat in seas of assumed truth, and I’ll forever be bitter to live in a world where not a word spoken can be taken at face fucking value any longer. I don’t know if I know something or if the person who told me it made it sound believable. But at least...at least some truths, few in number, seem immutable, stalwart before trial. Ever precious. This one at least I would have carved in stone by the hands of God himself; I’d put my life to it were a wager on the matter held: Death metal is the best fucking music ever made.
...and then I listen to slam, and sometimes the faith wavers. It is possible, obviously, for any and all genres to have their disagreeable moments. But bad slam death is something else. At worst, it’s so far beyond boring that it’s actually tranquilizing, useful only for sedation prior to deeply invasive surgical procedures. The style lends itself to monotony well, and as a result it can take more deftness than is appreciated to play it well. Dysentery, though, should present a practiced hand at the tiller. They’ve been going since the early ‘00s, with my first experience of them being when they oozed into my life on the “Excruciatingly Euphoric Torment” split with the much-missed Gutrot. I love that split like my own limbs. And it was mainly on the strength of it – plus a Pacific depth of irresistible nostalgia – that had me pounce on this new Dysentery record like a jaguar on a hamster. I don’t listen to anything expecting it to fall foul of my own fairly lax rubrics for these things, but with stuff like this...well. It’s always nice to have the teenage memories vindicated isn’t it? There’s a sliver of my youth and the further integrity of my faith in my judgement at stake here. So. All these years of humbling self reflection later, just how rose tinted were my glasses?
This is a competent album. That’s damning with faint praise, I know, and maybe part of the problem is that October saw Internal Bleeding send forth a cudgelling salvo of their own, but if a word was my word limit “competent” is where the verdict would stand. It’s one of those unlovely situations in which a clinical recounting of its features makes it sound almost exactly like something I would be haplessly smitten by. Its snare springs through the mix like an antipersonell mine, something crude and crass in its butchery, wrapped in bolts and lying in wait to maul and punish in a sudden flash of impending mutilations. The bass has the fleshy weight of a fresh mass grave, corpse after nameless corpse piled and heaped to moulder and comingle as they compact and seep into befouled soil. Guitar tones equally hefty. Primal, even. Each thud of it the wet crunch of one ape slamming the skull of another into a shapeless smear on the jungle floor. Vocals gurgle, infected phlegm milky and bloodstreaked, splashing the rear of rotting teeth. The components are there; and select moments see the band make stellar use of them. “Shackled by Ideology” opens with a battering ram of open string palm mutes that switch between tremelo, triplets, and straight chugging mixed in with slams that flail unrestrained on a war machine of shifting drum grooves, before it flies up a gear at 0.30 to cross-breed a swift OSDM riff with further slams in a way that outlines the virtues of both methods of malfeasance. The hunching, muscle bound primate grooves hit so much harder for the contrast. “Fraticidium” kills by the same modus operandi: blastbeats like gunfire pin the foe in place while from the skies a high-caliber ascending tremolo riff strafes the battlefield, filling foxholes well with slick mud-spattered lumps of human meat. How gloriously do the slams resound afterwards!
Yet elsewhere the slaughter becomes rote. Even the cruellest acts become overfamiliar. How many shattered heads must you see before another becomes just another? Through human history there are men beyond counting with dark, poisoned souls for whom killing was a task as much as washing dishes or filing taxes. One of the most prolific murderers that we are cursed to know of was Vasily Blokhin, a soviet executioner hand picked by communist butcher and possible Mario brother Josef Stalin. He would, alongside a team of assistants, have his victims brought before him whereupon he would shoot them in the base of the skull with one of a set of .25 ACP Walther pistols, have the room hosed down, the corpse removed, and then on to the next. So on and so on ‘til the thousands bled together and he can only have thought of them as numbers, if indeed they were thought of at all. Something similar feels at play here. Sudden changes in timing or tempo pique interest, such as the pinch-harmonic ice picks jammed through your eye sockets at 0.46 in “Indignation Unravels”, but so much of the rest of the song feels at a loss for how to progress beyond “chug, chug, chugchug, CHUG, cha-chug, chug, chug”. I’m never bored exactly, but outside the odd surprise where the band flex muscles in an occasionally less orthodox pose, nor am I ever really engaged.
“Ascend This Harrowing Dream” rides a serviceable but otherwise unexceptional slam riff for what feels like years towards the end. I normally don’t rate instrumental introductory tracks especially highly, but in this case virtually everything that Dysentery have to offer is contained within “Transference”. It’s less than two minutes long and encapsulates basically the whole album. “Transposed Benevolence” only hammers home the unadventurous spirit of the entire endeavour by saddling the most typical chromatic slam pattern conceivable at its tail end and trotting it away into the sunset for what felt, again, like years. And I think that this is where we return to my first of far, far too many paragraphs. The machinations of Dysentery are, on paper, things I should be Ecstatic at. I wrote as much in praise of Internal Bleeding just last month, and last year Carnivore Diprosopus penned a release that dropkicked my head clean off my shoulders. I look at what Dysentery do, and wonder how such similar ingredients lead to a final product that feels to have so little spark against its compatriots. I began to wonder with horror if I was tiring of this little subsection of the musical space. Was I fooling myself when I gave Internal Bleeding and Carnivore Diprosopus such glowing testimony? I’ve had a few crises of faith before, but...in this case, mercifully, I think my convictions hold true to the evidence at hand. Returning to those albums only reaffirmed the esteem I held at the time. Hell, even going back to the aforementioned Gutrot split was enough to confirm that this new Dysentery album unfortunately finds itself lacking against even their own standards.
Maybe a review of a metal album is an awkward place in which to shoehorn discussions on my tribulations in trusting both myself and the world around me. But it’s always worth re-establishing basic principles. If you met someone that didn’t believe man made climate change was real, or if they did disagree with vaccinations, it’s a good idea to understand the land upon which you ground your own ideas. In this case, Dysentery presented an album that, while not terrible, was so generic that it had me questioning whether I liked slam or if I just gravitated to the prime examples of the genre and assumed them to speak for the style as a whole. For those of you who are emotionally entangled with the genre to an extent only divisible by crowbar, you may well get more out of this than I was capable of – more power to you if so. For me though this was, sadly, rather depressing.
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