Cerebral Cereal

The 2000s were really something special for death metal. If the 80s was learning how to walk and the early to mid 90s was the genre first honest attempt at a 100 meter sprint, then the 2000s (and let’s be honest, late 90s too) was a coked up F1 grand prix. The number of bands that took what Suffocation & Co. were doing and building their very own sound on it is nearly uncountable. Inveracity, Deeds of Flesh, Gorgasm, and Brodequin are just some of the now household BDM acts that started gaining traction around this time. Pyaemia is also the son of these times, shocking the Netherlands and the rest of the planet with a single full-length album the likes of which hasn’t been met to this day in terms of brutality and catchiness.

Brutal death metal and catchiness? What’s the nonsense about?! Well, while the band is still on the gore-infused, grey matter regurgitating end of the death metal spectrum, it never goes so far into shock value where musicality would suffer. It’s not the slam metal philosophy of the last decade of trying to out-fistfuck the other bands for the sake of having more faecal matter on your arms. No. Pyaemia takes great pride in just how listenable Cerebral Cereal is. The rabid grunts of Joel Sta are the usual brutal death metal shtick but mixed in such a way that they feel warm. Granted, warm like blood freshly splattered on your face, but it’s still warm. These gutturals sometimes get switched up with higher pitched screams or gurgles much akin to how Exhumed utilizes dual vocal styles, just a bit more infrequently.

When it comes to instruments however, it’s a lot less typical. Sure, you got insanely down-tuned guitars chugging away with admirable ferocity, and the beats are most certainly of the blast variety, but they never get obnoxiously overdone. Groove is the name of the game here with riffs even developing into recognizable melodies and passages, making every track distinctly different. This alone should be enough to anyone familiar with brutal death metal to have their interest piqued, but that’s not all! These earworm guitar passages manage to stay heavy without being littered with breakdowns like slam acts are, only really having a brief bridge section on Malodorous Rancidity where they slow down for repeated hammer blows to the cranium.

Clocking in at just 29 minutes, Cerebral Cereal isn’t a long record by any stretch of the imagination. This is good. Why? Because I’m tired of listening to records in this genre that expect you to pay attention to them for 40+ minutes, only to waste the time with music that’s A) unremarkable or B) could have been condensed into a 30-35-minute-long album. The sweet spot is between 27 and 36 for me, and as anyone with a 1st grade elementary school education could tell, Cerebral Cereal falls in there. This way it never gets relegated to background music, and you never confuse the spiralling melody of Sugar Spiced Anus (it feels so wrong to write this down) with the outlandish stop-n-go squeals of Blood Spewed on My Face.

The band doesn’t run out of steam for a second and finish just when they said everything they wanted to say. And as it ends, I find myself constantly reaching for the replay button. Why is that? On the surface their music describes much like many other bands of the genre, but at the same time… They are just unique. Sure, many bands have prioritised catchy, groovy licks, but none of them sound quite like Cerebral Cereal. They are all lacking the extra tightness, that additional chemical X of headbangability (lovely word, let’s pretend it’s real) that makes this 2001 (somewhat) hidden gem stick out. All of this earned Pyaemia a permanent place in my BDM listening rotation next to the likes of Malignancy and Cryptopsy, and sent me down the 2000s death metal rabbit hole I’m still just knee-deep in. Will I find another release that fits all my arbitrary criteriums and makes my dreams wet? Well even if I don’t, at least I had breakfast.