And the Sickness Began...

The first ten years of death metal's history are a never-ending exploration. Sure, you can go on List Challenges, find some underground metal nerd's top 100 releases, and go through everything mentioned... but the serendipity of listening to what comes your way through the æther is way more fun.

Exulceration is a Swiss deathgrind/goregrind band. Like so many of their fold, they briefly united for a few small releases before life took hold - one demo, one split, and then a random 2012 split LP. One of those bands that I'm really not sure how you even find nowadays outside of The Algorithm(TM), or if you happened to be in the scene back then!

And the Sickness Began... is their first release - 16 minutes of demo-fi death metal and goregrind. This is one of those releases I would've dismissed two years ago before my demo deep-dives. The production is... well, tape hiss is a compositional element. It's an independently-released mainland European demo, after all. The bass is overpowered by the guitars, with the intro of "Syndrome of Regurgitation" really being the only time you can hear it. The vocals are deep-throated roars - I thought they were a fuzzy bass guitar upon first appearance on "Cerebral Suppuration". They are powerful for sure - for comparison, try out Xysma's Swarming of the Maggots demo (though much clearer over there). I love that vocal tactic, it's like a cursed vocal fry.

The songs are a various mismash of goregrind and death metal sounds, going strong through the horror as bands at the birth of the nineties continued to push extreme metal to whatever boundary they could imagine. You can't really point out distinct individual songs, but I'm of the mind that demos like this really aren't meant to be experienced that way anyway - extreme metal is very much an "album experience" kind of subset, where you take the full piece as it is.

This demo has goobliness that really speaks to the amateurishness quality of so many early extreme metal bands. This is a feature, not a bug. "Evisceration" has a totally random solo that is a note-for-note replication of "In the Hall of the Mountain King"! It's the kind of thing that gets ironed out by experience telling you that won't work - but the stitched-together quality of so much old death metal and other forms of extreme metal is precisely what makes it so interesting to listen to. Exulceration won't win high favor for outright songcraft, but for demo-divers like me, it's great fun to listen in and hear what some kids in the middle of the Alps were doing just because they could.