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Stench Collector > Effluviatorium Du Jour > Reviews
Stench Collector - Effluviatorium Du Jour

Redefining the Concept of Brutality in OSDM - 90%

MetalinMontague, January 10th, 2025
Written based on this version: 2021, Digital, Redefining Darkness Records

This is a bias review. Regardless, it needs to be written.

Stench Collector’s debut release was a much needed addition to death metal in New England. This project was spearheaded by Mark Pechak. I’m partial to his artistry because I was in a black metal band with him many years ago. Mark was a solid bassist and singer for that band. However, at our core, we just wanted to write punishing, old school death metal that teetered on slam. In fact, we were ramping up to do something new when my inability to be present for practices made things nearly impossible. Frankly, we also worked at very different speeds. I could articulate a concept and riffs pretty quickly. Mark often took his time. This is the thing I admired about him most. He slowed and appreciated the process of writing extreme music. He made you a more mindful musician.

Mark’s patience was omnipresent in his life. He was a teacher, a swim coach, and an undercover brutal death metal musician. All jokes aside, his patience and attention to detail are evident in this band’s debut release. If you passively listen to Effluviatorium Du Jour, it comes off as a “for fans off” OSDM release. Creepy album art, sick logo, drudgingly heavy riffs. Got it.

If you take the time to begin peeling back the layers of this deadly onion…you realize that the concept of this album goes further down. Below that basement where the stench collector is preparing pestilent dinners for his family that hangs on to the crumbling American fabric by a thread. Below this basement lies the very framework for this EP: societal collapse. It doesn’t surprise me that Mark chose a traditionally gory and gross album cover. I think he did that to hang on to some kind of element of old school death metal; to ensure that it reached the intended crowd. Mark, however, based his horror in reality.

Disgusted by what he described as rampant greed in capitalism, Mark shifted his focus onto a crumbling American society. And in these times we could see why this topic weighed on his mind. He had always focused on injustices. He found those to be the truest measure of brutality. In writing about these topics, he didn’t intend to virtue signal. He was not attempting to garner morality points from the scene kids. He wanted to engage in an artistic dialogue about what he deemed to be indicative of brutality. This was a common thread in all of Mark’s music. His other projects were Frontier, Desolate Wind, Putrid Goat, and Cats. In Frontier, those themes are very clear.

I intended to make this a review, but it’s also a musical eulogy. To summarize Stench Collector’s debut: it re-examined the current landscape of death metal. No longer are the scary monsters, of both fiction and non-fiction, the things that inspire true fear. The true horror lies in the current human experience. The drums on this EP are gut wrenching. They aren’t overly flashy, but capture the old school death metal vibe perfectly. Shawn is a masterful drummer, and it saddens me to say that you were all just getting to know his ability as a musician. He is a creative and passionate fast learner of all things metal. Whoever scoops him up as a drummer for their next project is very lucky. I could not speak higher of his musicianship.

The bass is what resonates with me the most when it comes to Mark. It’s his main instrument and he had such a profoundly deep knowledge of how to make his bass sound devastatingly heavy while also making it unique to him. The guitars in the project were executed masterfully. Mark wrote death metal sans frills. He wrote straight forward, hair whip inducing riffs. He was careful and sparse with his leads and the tone always teetered on something you’d hear on a Burning Witch album. One would have to be attuned to his initial love of doom and stoner metal to pick up on this. Those who knew Mark knew him to be a mere extension of his deliberately loud and carefully constructed stadium level amp rigs. He made a basement sound like a fucking arena.

Mark’s vocal delivery and aforementioned lyrical context shouldn’t be viewed as a “heady notion,” but rather a genuinely passionate attempt to bring death metal to new places. To evolve the conversation on what topics the genre can envelop. And this all stemmed from a deep passion and respect for the art form. A true artist aims higher than emulation or imitation. They aim to further the craft. In music history, when this is done, it is often ridiculed and met with resistance. But more often than not, it breaks through, and reaches another person thinking outside of the box. This is what Mark did when he wrote music. To know him was to know an unforgivingly honest human being. Mark never minced his words. He lived life on his own terms, just as the legendary metal heads always do.

I leave you with this:

There are many Marks in music communities throughout the world. Mark and I would always fight about some of the decisions he made that were often not the best for him. I’m glad I was able to argue with, and FOR this man. I, along with his true friends, wanted what was best for him. Keep having those conversations with your friends. It won’t make you popular, but it will keep you honest. Thank you to Shawn from Stench Collector, Tom from Cats, and any other of his band members that supported and loved him. Thank you to his parents for raising a crazy metal head that devoted himself to young people. And finally, thank you Mark. Thank you for being a great friend. For always talking through problems and disagreements. For your passion for music.

Life is long until it isn’t. Check on your friends.

Nasty, but in a Bad Way - 39%

sunn_bleach, November 29th, 2021
Written based on this version: 2021, Digital, Redefining Darkness Records

Stench Collector puts its worst foot forward with a one-minute sample of someone messily eating while a boy describes cooking a cat. I'm not averse to grisly samplism and gruesome imagery - but that intro track is incredibly misophonic, both in concept and in execution. Though plenty of death metal is about crossing lines and exploring transgressive subject matter, there's also a point where something is just plain bad taste - and that introduction is one of those moments. Yes, you can just skip it - but the mere fact that it introduces the album means its placement and intent matters.

The rest of this EP is four tracks of Autopsy-worship death metal. You probably know the kind: a meat-and-potatoes type of deal. Thick, dummy riffs throughout this release that encourages the kind of slow-headbanging that characterized half of Mental Funeral. The tracks feel their length though for the type of metal played; Stench Collector's mid-paced death metal stretches too long on "Gutworm" and "Bile Collector" but shines much more strongly on the comparatively shorter and sub-3 minute tracks of "Eye Socket Maggots" and "Carrion Cellar". Given that all the tracks are similarly oozy, those shorter tracks hold the stenchy, sub-basement approach to death metal much more strongly than the longer ones.

Though only 17 minutes (16 if you skip that intro), Effluviatorium Du Jour just feels like more of the same with this kind of death metal, overwhelming sound notwithstanding. Fans of this style are likely to not be disappointed at all - if you want that grime, then you're certainly in for it here. But if you're not, Effluviatorium Du Jour is just going to sound tepidly exploitative. If you're interested in this type of sound, try out Torture Rack's Barbaric Persecution for tighter songwriting that spares no expense.

They had me at hello - 75%

we hope you die, June 30th, 2021

Boasting one of the best band names to land on my desk in a long time, these Rhode Island death metallers had me at hello. But despite the almost comical aesthetic and eyebrow raising moniker, there is a gravity and drama to ‘Effluviatorium Du Jour’ that elevates it above mere gore novelty. As the band explained to Invisible Oranges of lead single ‘Gutworm’: “The driving concept behind STENCH COLLECTOR ’s lyrical theme is suburban decay and the plight of the working middle class twisted at the intersection of our nation’s failing capitalist economy.”

Whether such heady notions actually come through in the music or not will probably be coloured by an individual listener’s outlook. But one thing is at least certain, Stench Collector know how to craft a solid, swaggering EP of meaty death metal that is both malevolent and downright intimidating.

Production is a wet slap in the face. Thick, dripping guitar tones cover the mix in upsetting sonic matter, but retain enough solidity to articulate the chunky riffs, allowing for choppy staccato chords to cut across the slime and give the music form. Drums are equally heavy, but the pillow punching snare provides additional clarity and rhythmic navigation whilst the kick drum proves to be equally as cutting, with brief 16th trills acting as agents of chaos over the inertia of sludgy guitars. Vocals are just as happy spitting forth guttural growls as they are sustained throaty exclamations of revelry.

And revelry really is the word here. For death metal, ‘Effluviatorium Du Jour’ is kept relatively slow. But it maintains a constantly unfurling rhythmic swagger, one augmented by stop/start riffs connected by chromatic licks and celebratory accents. Drums bend around these undulating riff shapes with a performance informed more by ordered fills as opposed to a constant, driving beat. This lends the music a sense of joy despite the overt horrors packed within. This is not aggressive or existential death metal, it is instead perfectly at home in the violent amorality it surrounds itself with. Similar to Blood or Nuclear Death it creates a surrealist world of abhorrent violence with a playful, almost matter-of-fact delivery that is compellingly upsetting.

In that sense Stench Collector have thus far achieved what they set out to do. At the core of the most mundane suburban existence are terrors that are so at home as to be almost tedious. Completely unaware of the revulsion they inspire, they inhabit a drab life of disconnect, so preoccupied with the bureaucracy of their craft to even acknowledge the horrors they invoke or the juxtapositions they create by virtue of their close proximity to commuter life.

Originally published at Hate Meditations