Sloth Herder – Abandon Pop Sensibility (demo)
Sloth Herder’s Abandon Pop Sensibility delivers a nice pallette cleanser for the by-the-numbers thrash, progressive metal, and what Marty calls ‘knuckle-dragging’ styles of death metal I’ve been slogging through lately. Described as “blackened grind” from MD, you’ll find far more than that on this six-song overdose. Swirling, sludge-drenched guitars warp the earholes with an inescapably thick, fast, and impending tsunami of guitar-based hysteria. A ’90s mathcore aesthetic backs up the atonal passages and blastbeats with J. Lyons’ rabid, screaming vocals of urgency. A wallowing bass tone punkifies the Black Metal riffage, and remains appreciably audible throughout the album’s varied random acts of violence. If SH’s influences were people, I’d describe this joyful noise thusly: a coked-up Thou meets a tweaking Kylesa (in a noisy mood), offering her a chance to witness his “dj skills”, whereupon he turns and hits play on two aging boomboxes at the same time. Out of one can be heard Deathspell Omega’s Paracletus on another, a random bootleg of live Voivod spliced with Botch’s We Are The Romans. And somehow, amazingly, the cacophonous racket works. Whether slowly sloughing off unnecessary skin on ‘Relapse Reward’ or robotically slicing flesh into Spam on ‘Bleached’, Abandon Pop Sensibility justifies itself with hardcore workmanship and a larger-than-life presence encapsulating a raw yet darkened production. Sloth Herder as a band forces their sound straight from the stage to your speakers with overtly chaotic effort rooted firmly in a foundation of grinding tech, sealed up lovingly in a tidy, 15-minute ticking mailbomb. Standing ashore of the Great Same Swamp we seekers can find ourselves suffocating in, the sounds of Sloth Herder will roughly raise you from the muck, saving you from a complacency-induced glassy-eyed stupor sonically infecting you day-in and day-out. Something new, something familiar, angry and yes, wicked – this way from Maryland comes. Open up and let ’em on in. -Jim
Worm Gear 