Rotting Dominion

Despite the cloying, claustrophobic atmosphere seeping from every pore of Psionic Madness’s latest release, ‘Rotting Dominion’ offers a variety of colour palettes to wet the appetite. Chasmic grind is animated via some nuanced and surprisingly proggy tangents, pivoting on vibe creation as much as riff manipulation. This is somewhat expected given the “weird” pedigree of these musicians from projects such as Out of the Mouth of Graves and Acausal Intrusion.

The mix is generally murky, with a cloud of clashing, dissonant guitar lines threading their way across these tracks, borrowing elements from antecedents as diverse as Gorguts and Demilich to Brutal Truth and Blut Aus Nord. But despite the orchestral aspirations of the multifaceted guitar work, ‘Rotting Dominion’ retains an undeniably DIY aesthetic. The drums, despite the forensic and layered precision of the performance, are kept tinny and largely free of studio makeup. The snare sound would be at home in your average garage slam outfit. The vocals for the most part settle on a burpy, goregrind style of gurgling, guttural outbursts. Again, the reverb has been kept refreshingly subtle, allowing the vocals to enhance the percussive qualities of the music rather than flooding everything with surplus static.

This form of blackened goregrind elevated by elements of progressive death metal is infectiously popular within the death metal community right now (a quick scan down the Blood Harvest roster will make this apparent). But despite the fact that Psionic Madness have foregrounded this aesthetic, they stand apart from their many contemporaries. Not only through deploying unique musical nuances borrowed from the quirky end of progressive death metal of yesteryear, but more broadly for deploying atmosphere as ornamentation and enhancement rather than a substitute for substantive compositions.

These pieces are rich with activity, a miasma of playful riffing of an unpredictable tonal centre, motivated by drum work that slides from linear momentum to angular cross fills of ponderous chaos. The result is a compelling blend between the dark surrender of all control that this subgenre trades on, supplemented by a strict adherence to the music’s own internal logics, a complex three dimensional interplay of tonal and rhythmic philosophies that manage to parley somewhere in the middle, creating a vessel for bracing entropic collapse retaining an unshakable degree of solidity.

Originally published at Hate Meditations