Archaic Bloodshed

Boasting a greater degree of fluidity and contrast than your standard brutal death metal package, California’s Embodied Torment offer up a brief but refreshing EP of dense chaos metal. It straddles the border between the mechanistic tech death of Devangelic or Putridity and a more organic, intuitive lineage akin to a hyper fast Morbid Angel. Having said that, Embodied Torment make scant use of tempo changes, favouring instead an array of consistent bursts of speed, culminating in a sense of chaos, as ordered information is packed into the smallest pockets possible, until any semblance of organisation is stripped away, leaving nothing but a swirling stream of chaos.

Atop this muscular foundation are placed strikingly melodic guitar leads flowing from the peripheral shape of the rhythm section. Whilst Embodied Torment create context and space for this facet of their character to grow, as on the clean breakdown on the opening track ‘Deconsecration of the Monolith’, for the most part the lead guitar acts as a welcome antagonist to the explicitly disordered motion of the rhythm section. Soaring guitar leads are provided with additional framing by the jagged contrast to their surroundings, lending the swirling darkness a surprising glimmer of light and moral purpose.

Drums list wildly between oddly emphasised blast-beats, to jazz shuffles, and the choppy, staccato punches typical of garden variety tech death. They embody a welcome freeform structure, able to jump from the rigid technical interplay of the style to flowing, ambient swells of percussive noise. Vocals stick with the requisite guttural growls of the genre, bottoming out the textural offering with a welcome degree of deadpan violence.

‘Archaic Bloodshed’ refreshes the format of tech death by destabilising the strictures of its foundation and seasoning the brutalist aesthetic with some highly traditional and not unpretty accents, brightening the landscape with the promise of hope.

Originally published at Hate Meditations