Watching the Maggots Erupt from Your Putrid Skull

Fight the Demiurge are a band who I reviewed a while back, and while I didn't really like the material present on their previous EP, this song actually shows quite a bit of potential for an album full of fun, snappy brutal death metal. While it's hard to judge a band based on less than two minutes of material, "Watching the Maggots Erupt from Your Putrid Skull" demonstrates that Fight the Demiurge's music has improved in practically every quantifiable manner.

The songwriting is a lot less disjointed, for one, with its few riffs all snapping nicely together into a concise and coherent piece. The drums are a lot less George Kollias-ish in their ostentation, not really doing anything which isn't absolutely essential to the song's execution. The music in general feels like the result of a much more ideologically unified project, as opposed to one of those one-man projects which toss every idea the writer has at the songs. It still lacks a hard-set "style", per se, that could be called the band's own, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

The song itself is led primarily by two sections - a faster, blastier part backed by a faceless DM tremolo riff (which is sadly rather underwhelming), and a slower, punchier section which sounds like a slam/breakdown from one of Pathology's more recent deathcore-influenced albums (which is much closer to my liking). A couple other oddities permeate the music beyond that (such as a perplexing devolution into downtuned chugging around halfway through, and the drums' blasting onwards after the guitars fade from the song), but aside from those the basic buildup is surprisingly simple.

The vocal style is different on this song as well; whereas Hypostasis of the Archons was gurgly but not particularly low, the vocals here are much deeper and cavernous. The most immediate comparison coming to my mind is latter-era Matti Way, though their slight echoing throughout the music also reminds me a bit of bands like Pathologist and Antediluvian. While I enjoyed the vocals on the band's previous EP a fair bit, I actually prefer these - they're unique, to say the least, not to mention performed better for what they are.

The riffs still aren't exactly "wow" material, and the whole thing suffers from generally, well, bedroomish production - the guitars, in particular, are a bit thin, and the drums tend to bleed over into almost everything else in the music - but this is most definitely a step in the right direction. I'd honestly listen to a full album of stuff like this: it's short, punchy BDM with goregrind vibes and various elements which are decent at worst and surprisingly good at best. As far as one-man BDM goes, the quality here is practically above almost everything else; give it a shot if you're interested.