Album Review: Chairmaker - Leviathan Carcass
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Leviathan Carcass is the debut release from multi-instrumentalist, Neil Erskine’s solo grind project, Chairmaker. Not that Neil is a stranger to extremity in music, having cut his teeth with doomsters Sunsmasher, death metal crew Suffering Rites and the black and grinding Chronocide; add to that his being heavily involved in the logistics of the mighty Damnation Festival for a number of years and I think we can safely say Neil knows his onions when to comes to abrasive heavy metal.
Chairmaker is Neil’s first purely grind project and Leviathan Carcass kicks off Ratlicker, the record’s lead single and a survivor from the three track 2023 Demo. Terrified and terrifying screams are matched only by the rampant instrumentation and blistering pace of this sub-one-minute blitzkrieg; landing early on the disc is the title track – another upgrade from the demo – and Making Nails, of all which fail to break the sixty-second mark but are no less abrasive and bruising for their brevity. Leviathan Carcass even managed to squeeze an earworm into its forty-second duration.
At the other end of the scale is Dead Optimist which clocks in at a whisker away from a whopping two-and-a-half-minutes, and uses every second to establish itself, introduce chugging guitars and flailing riffs, and even force heads to bob with a nasty beatdown. Add soundbites and extra instrumentation and treat this as a showcase of Chairmaker’s extended talents.
The remainder of Leviathan Carcass sits in and around the ninety-second timescale, blasting with unbridled aggression and raging over filthy guitars. Powdered Nostalgia hits in waves, Pigfucker makes good use of stabbing death metal riffs and Good Art by Shit People switches up the pacing, takes us on a big drop and generally goes about grooving away to itself.
Neil sounds equally adapt behind the drum kit as he does cranking out six-string chugs, with Loud, Confident and Wrong featuring some heroic percussion and Micron-Thick Skin seeming to want to break the speed limit from the very start.
Grindcore, being a child of punk, has always been political in its nature and Chairmaker’s debut is no exception, as it addresses the terrible state of the world at this moment. But, as the idiom goes, it’s an ill wind that blow nobody any good, and if the way to make sense of it all is to channel that frustration into unrelentingly visceral musical aggression, then at least something positive will come out of the whole damn mess.
