Pustulant Spawn

I came across Evulse a bit too late, having a hard time acquiring a copy of their Pustulant Spawn cassette until recently. But now that I’ve gotten ahold of one, I can take in this crushing demo the way it was meant to be. From Oakland, CA, these headsplitters crank out four swift bangers in a familiar manner but harder to digest than some. For how tightly it’s produced, the passages themselves are a handful.

By that, I basically mean that there are a lot of unexpected shifts and rough transitions in the writing itself. If that’s not enough, those vocals are a seriously tough swallow, but for the seasoned listener it will settle well thanks to it standing out from the norm a bit. Seriously, there isn’t the slightest hint of dialing back on intensity anywhere. How they managed to do this in the demo stage in thirteen short minutes is beyond me. Especially since there isn’t a ridiculous amount of noise.

The opener “Repulsive Infestation” is what lays all this on the heaviest. The burning chugs in a non-hardcore fashion carry a lot of weight here, and the riffs themselves are all over the place. I’ll admit, the flaw with that is that it gets tough to tell where the songs change. Each track gets a little shorter than the last, thus getting more on-the-nose the deeper you go. My favorite would actually have to be “Worms Made Flesh” at the end strictly because of the way it swings back into the most rumbling part of the demo after dropping to its deepest trench.

For what we’ve got, Pustulant Spawn is really strong. Some loose ends could be tied up when they move to a full-length, but that’s to be expected. The core of what’s going on here manages to sidestep the tactics that flood the scene, and while that’s fun sometimes, so is this. Longtime fans of the genre should definitely lend this their ears.

Originally written for Metal Inferno