Black Earth Child

Here is where my journey through the Disfiguring the Goddess discography draws to a close, at least for now - with Black Earth Child, the unpromoted phantom album that only came to light on its release date. While you can probably guess by now that I'm a pretty big fan of the guy's material, I was initially a bit skeptical on the idea of Big Chocolate releasing a second full-length right alongside the one he had just unleashed. As surprised as I was, I (like most other people, I imagine) was expecting a compilation of discarded ideas from the Deprive writing sessions. Fortunately, my worries subsided as soon as I actually gave it a whirl - not only is Black Earth Child a good album, it's stylistically distinct enough from Deprive that it really does make them feel like a pair of complementary, matched albums.

To put it simply: this is the most metal-influenced Disfiguring the Goddess release to date. Riffs are everywhere - the sweet riffs, they practically flourish throughout the songs here. There are tons of them, everywhere. What there are also a lot of are slams - this might be the first Disfiguring the Goddess release to feature actual slams instead of big, clunky deathcore chugs. And Jesus, are they pummelling. If you haven't gathered yet, Disfiguring the Goddess's music is pretty ridiculously intense - adding Gorevent-styled slams to the mix certainly doesn't dilute that one bit. This is also one of the project's least rhythmically spastic albums - the djent influence here is finally down to damn near zilch, so almost everything's in a familiar but simultaneously refreshing 4/4 pace. Hearing the band operate like this almost makes me want to ask why they haven't permanently operated around these time signatures, because ironically this material is arguably the most fluid stuff ever released under Disfiguring the Goddess. It moves almost exclusively with rolling double-bass or blast beats for the faster parts, and it's no worse for wear because of it. The album speeds up and slows down gradually, picking up the tempo over time rather than jerking from slow riff to fast riff and back. You probably wouldn't think it, but the lack of super-abrupt shifts and the scaled-back complexity make Black Earth Child surprisingly easy to chill out to while still providing an agreeable level of brutality.

There are chuggy breakdowns here, yes, but the emphasis is rarely purely on them. Yeah, you get sections like the moment a minute into the title track that recall Suicide Silence's "Bludgeoned to Death", but these are a rarity for the most part. More often, when they're used, your attention is centered on the cool, murky synths hovering over the mix, which are darker and less active than the ones used on Deprive. The synths on this particular album are spectacular, with a personal highlight for me being the quiet, ambient sections of "Lead to the Desert"... this quiet soundscape uncomfortably wavers in the air for a minute, and gives way to a blissful riff that is way more evocative than anything in a BDM/deathcore band's discography has any right to be. I feel like even the regular tremolo riffs and chunky triplet chugs on this album carry a bit more atmosphere than Deprive ever did. At the very least, I think it's a more intriguing atmosphere - you could chalk it up to the brilliant cover art, but something about the gurgles and shrieks echoing over the comparatively minimalistic music on Black Earth Child makes for stuff that's a bit more fun to observe than its companion album's material.

This has fewer ball-grabbing moments than Deprive did (though credit must be given to parts like the inexplicably great riff in "The Mother's Hand, Sixteen" that's just one note being triplet-chugged to death), and altogether I'll probably end up listening to the former more often, but I'd be a fool to deny that Black Earth Child sees the band at their most atmospheric, playing with a sound that's just as subtle and numbing as it is heavy and skull-crushing. Most people will probably end up liking Deprive more because it's flashier and is less likely to be interpreted as undercooked, but if I absolutely had to pick a favorite, my heart lies with this one.

As this final review draws to a close, thus concludes your personal tour through five years of releases by one of the most interesting, genre-bending extreme music projects active today. Feel free to return to your regularly scheduled listening of Saxon and - ha, man, who am I kidding, nobody who sits through an entire Disfiguring the Goddess review (let alone a mini-series) listens to fucking Saxon. Carry on, either way.