Molested - Stormvold
Review: Uncompromising waves of rhythmic aggression and powerdrill intonation guide this work, overlapping a wall of noise with emergent harmonies, constantly further eroding reality like a fleshblender. While a percussionist pugilistically reverberates his drum heads guitar and bass wail together in culminating violence, tuned not as much to the muffled chopping noise but the singing resonance of the lightspeed strumming hereto employed. This rhythm is cloaked in the abrasive mechanical tone of the amplification/distortion and the coarse textural whisper of death metal vocals, muted in relativity to the pounding release behind it.
This is an EP, with four songs and a substantially reworked song from their previous album. For death metal fans, with a warning to progressive fans that the musical conventionality and conventional training angle is not emphasized here although innovation is.
Structures here are still partially evolved from their origins, although the composition behind this album is far beyond the first release form this band, Blod-draum, which although savage showed its uncertainty. While that is still present larger divisions of each song -- what makes them non-homogenous in concept behind instances, in each mutation of drum riff, guitar riff, or bass texture -- are more articulated. Components move within songs to avoid obvious verse-chorus instantiations, but oftentimes the cyclic nature of composition here provides much the same effect of rolling over into self on a meta-level rather than a literal viewpoint. Melodic notes introduced in sequence deliver a scream of urgency behind the riff, appealing to its weakness and emotion but tugging through the sweetly dissonant to the vile, repugnant, merciless: these songs are not made to sound good, at all, but to abrade and destroy with primitive elements placed into a larger content of aesthetic of hatred.
The unconventional, although sometimes awkward, nature of the harmonic structures here provides addition punk-ness in the form of listener abrasion; the miles gained in authenticity are nothing compared to the gain it forces on the compositional hand that shaped it, an unravelling mystery as Molested mold chopped, epileptic, frenzied discoherence from extreme chromatic nihilistic grind-metal like Deeds of Flesh into the darker, chaotic, less demonstrative side of metal design, an obsession with melody reflecting a question of the need for emotion. The death metal roots of Molested promenade in the bridging structures and mazes of variation that let them lead their listeners into circuitous complexity into variations of the same brutal conclusions, but the future lies in the potential they have revealed for layering percussive, truncated metal riffs with melody in a manner to enhance aggression and disturbance without creating the more theatrical style of simple black metal.