Internecine Excoriation
Prognosticate The Decrepitude
7.4
Trust the bloody Australians to vomit forth yet more utterly uncompromising, sick-as-fuck-yet-kinda-awesome death/grind into the world. Prognosticate The Decrepitude is Intercenine Excoriation's first demo, and a promising beast it is.
Typically for Australians, they have managed to create something that makes Devourment or Digested Flesh sound tame, yet somehow maintains a sense off-kilter songsmanship depth that we've come to expect from metal down under. Make no mistake, Prognosticate The Decrepitude is brutal slam death in one of its most vitriolic and bowel-voiding incarnations I've yet to hear. But before you all run away, this is not quite as disposable an item as the tag 'slam death' tends to imply. From creativity we might expect complexity, especially in the case of brutal death metal, but Intercenine Excoriation stump expectation from the get go by simplifying the slam approach to an almost moronic level. After two minutes of harrowing screams, "Eclipsed Minions" completes its final two minutes with about three riffs. We have a heavy, almost melodic riff that is developed slightly near the end of the song, but the rest is nothing but crawling chug with intermittent pinched harmonics, constant gutter vocals, and overlaid with alternate blasting and midpaced double bass with groove-accenting, typically minimal snare. "Hacksaw Cesarion" and "Abortuary Debris" push buzzsawing tremolo riffs and turbulent, noisy guitar shredding to the forefront between chugs, while "Comatose Autopsy" and "Desolate" have almost geologically heavy doomier sections.
It doesn't sound like much, but the production job makes it all worthwhile. Much like Brodequin or Mexican Disgorge, Intercenine Excoriation make sound aesthetic part of their core appeal. Prognosticate The Decrepitude has such a convoluted, maxed-out din that it is simply pointless to listen to it at a low volume-- it just sounds like mud mixed with shit. No, to really hear anything other than 'DUNDUNDUNDUN....DUN...DUN...DUN..DUN", you really have to crank the decibels, and when you do that, by golly is it gleefully joyous to behold. The guitars compete aggressively with the bass to make a physical presence, so much so that after doing a twofold EQ bass extermination, the air is still being buffeted around the room like it's Thailand and I'm an underwater corpse being swept away. The drums are mercifully clear and it is a good thing, because if the kicks weren't on the clickier side of sound affairs, my subwoofers would have given-up and shaken themselves loose halfway through the first listen.
Admittedly, Intercenine Excoriation aren't going to win new fans to the brutal and slam death cause, but by biting the bullet and going completely overboard with the whole heavier-than-thou sound, they succeed at being paradoxically more listenable than many contemporaries. Factor in guitars that can be catchier and much more direct than the single, all-purpose slam riff offered by Devourment, and we have an unexpectedly good demo.
