Abominations of the Nebulah Mortiis

When people say the word "brutal," it is usually associated with bands like Enmity and Origin and other similarly technical and/or depraved acts. I think most people must have a different definition than I do, because those bands, regardless of quality otherwise, just do not strike me as any sort of epitome or peak of brutality. Brutality is something completely otherworldly, something that is completely crushing, cannibalistic and removed from any coherent train of human logic, something that pulls the listener into a void with no gravity or oxygen at all, where their lungs will be crushed and contorted in a million different directions. A "brutal" musical venture should not jump out at you with shock tactics and super-downtuned guitars, but rather pull you into its own domain with a suffocating songwriting sensibility and a truly primal sense of rage and hunger. Kreator was brutal on Pleasure to Kill, early Cryptopsy was brutal and Suffocation were brutal, and now Yogth Sothoth is another band I'd put under that same category.

This is really quite obscure, strange stuff, with few conventions or modern cliches used, if any at all. Yogth Sothoth's sound is heavily based on the Lovecraftian Cthulhu mythos, and as such, the entire sound resembles what I like to think of as the projected vomit of one of the Great Old Ones, maybe even Cthulhu himself. This stuff is just twisted on all counts. These songs don't have discernible starting or ending points, they just sort of trudge along through dimensions filled with sludgy, dissonant riffs and abstractly placed pinch harmonics - sounding absolutely alien and perverted when combined with the claustrophobic production. The vocals aren't really a driving force here; more like an aid to the crushing sound acrobatics. The riffs are not exactly headbangable, always jagged and contorted, and always coming at you like fiery, decaying asteroids in the deep, dark regions of space. The rhythm section is just classic Death Metal; excited, pummeling beatdown, an extremely furious assault on the senses.

Starting with the atmospheric introduction piece, this album moves through a collection of songs that mesh together into a giant, abyssal void of mercy, slaughtering the ears of the innocents with a gleeful finesse that I find admirable. Yogth Sothoth can do anything they want here; slow down to a groove, speed up with chunky Suffocation-esque riffage, have the vocals alternate between the normal gutteral blasphemies and a more high-pitched, devilish yowl that adds an extra dimension to the music - making it penta-dimensional rather than just quadruple-dimensional, you see. At parts, with all its chaotic, unrelenting, distorted insanity, this sounds like a glimpse into the mind of madness - where some bands can sound like the forthcoming of a Lovecraftian daemon, this band sounds like what happens after one witnesses such an aberration, like the main characters in any given story of his at the very end, having seen the truth.