Purulent Jacuzzi - Vanished In The Cosmic Futility

If potable water doesn't become a commodity in the future, free time will. In this age where the vicious cycle of debt and hopelessness that is getting a college degree is the most basic necessity for any job in existence, and retirement is but a quickly waning fad, the only thing that actually lies in the future for most of us is working as a means of survival. Forever. And ever. Until coronary and then “The End”. And, well, work is just getting more ruthless by the week. I haven't even left high school yet and I already find myself running from room to room, developing less time-consuming ways of gulping down food and concocting an all-week schedule that includes every detail from how much I sleep to exactly when I take a shit, all so that I can manage to savor some precious moments of relaxation, occasionally.

I really envy the people who decide to see a movie and then see it within the same week. I've given up on books and video games ages ago, and now I don't even have the time to listen to music anymore. I don't have the time to create music anymore. Fuck, I don't even have the time to sleep anymore! Succeeding is all about developing this balance between work and social life, meanwhile dying inside the whole time. And it amounts to fuck all. The only reason I allow myself to get all worked up here right now is because no one ever reads this shit anyway!

Alright, sorry about that. I guess that if you've read this far you do want an actual review. Well, my point with that wall of text was that, to me, albums such as Vanished In The Cosmic Futility are like a godsend. Why listen to Geogaddi, The Wall, or The Galilean Satellites for over an hour, when I can take in as much information from under 14 minutes of Purulent Jacuzzi's mindrape? And I mean this without a hint of sarcasm. This does rape the mind and I do love it.

What we have here is a very catchy, refined and natural-sounding mix of slam death metal with assorted grindcorisms, the occasional flourish of technicality, and a very original riffing style to boot. The musicians are excellently precise and very proficient, and the production joins it all together like no other. If those two sentences right now didn't convince you to give this a listen, I don't know what will. I guess I might try exploring a bit more detail.

The first thing that pops out when listening to Vanished In The Cosmic Futility is just how perfect the sound is. It's raw, screechy, punchy and gives you a rush. I have never before heard a BDM album with such a fitting sound. The vocalist also deserves a mention for doing right everything that the one from Waking the Cadaver did wrong, and to great effect. Everyone else is not far behind, providing instrumentation that is easy to follow despite its creativity. Structure-wise, there's not much of interest for the most part, but you get some very nice subtleties here and there. For the most part it's the grindcore style of linear “Riff1, then Riff2, then Riff3, then Riffx” endeavor, only with the “awesome per second” gauge too far up. And the riffs are something worth talking about. Every single one of them appears to have been crafted to perfection to create a style simultaneously very abstract and groovy. And then you get moments of guitar orgasms while the drums follow accordingly, and these moments are incredible.

The only actual problem I have with this album, a problem which is minuscule in comparison to the positive aspects, is the same that appears to plague every BDM album, and that is a cheesy intro and  uncompelling outro. Admittedly, without them the whole experience would have been under a quarter of an hour long, but I don't really mind. This is an album of unbridled intensity teaming up with creativity and attention to quality, and the two bookends are rendered rather insignificant by the constant magnificence of the rest. I'm not saying that Vanished In The Cosmic Futility has helped me find meaning in my life or spare time, but it is a perfect soundtrack for while I'm looking for it, and after.

Standout tracks:

Last Phase Of Leptospiriosis
Quadriplegia
Spastic Disphonia
Vortex Of The Inanity
Contagious Dementia
Rapture Of The Venous Vessels (New Version)
Pulsatory

Meatus - Inner Demons

Here's something I've come to notice: If I spend more time thinking of an album than listening to it, it'll usually mean that I like it way more than what's considered socially acceptable. For instance, I have this ritual of pulling out the Worlds Beyond the Veil CD and staring at it for a while, and then putting it back in with the rest of the CDs, all the while having a disturbingly happy expression. For the record, last time I listened to Worlds Beyond the Veil from first track to last was in June. The music within the release is so valuable to me that I avoid using it for its original intent, out of fear of having it ruined forever. Also, I prefer not listening to it because I don't like feeling disappointed. Yes, I am implying that it's about time I found a new favorite album ever.

Which brings us to Meatus's Inner Demons twofold. First, because this is not going to be my new all time favorite album, and second, because of how I know that. Without even getting into the musical aspect of the album yet, I'll mention the thing about knowing if I really love an album again. Like I said, if I spend more time thinking about an album than hearing it, it's usually because I adore it. And I stress the word “usually”, because there is one exception, and that being when an album is absolutely terrible. Inner Demons fits into this second category like a glove: ever since I first listened to it, I have thought about it daily, and then proceeded to have variable amounts of success at suppressing a need to burst out laughing. In fact, it fits so well into this latter category that it just so happens to be the new worst album I've ever listened to. Needless to say, I'm practically jumping with joy.

You see, being outrageously terrible is more challenging than being pretty-bad-to-okayish. You need to have some sort of idea of the rules to follow to make an acceptable release, and then you need to have the guts to consciously disregard them. I'm not saying that Anal Cunt are more talented than Nouvelle Vague, but, then again, I totally am. And Meatus know they're mildly talented. They know it so well that they use every opportunity they can to show off their uncanny ability of playing more than one genre. In the mean time, they only sacrifice a few unimportant things, such as sense of progression, dynamics, and being listenable. The result of this attempt at ultra-originality is a mix of some of the least interesting riffs in the history of death metal with a wad of the worst characteristics of every genre to have emerged in the last 40 years or so, all carefully arranged together by a tornado.

To give you a quick example, I'll describe the intro on the first track, which goes by the name of “Slave – Do It, End It All Now”. Oh, and have I mentioned the names of the songs here? They range from things like “Yeast – Societies Outcast”, to “G.H.B. - Sex Drugs Rock-n-Roll-n-Humility”, to the particularly clever “Spoken – ConfusionCONFUSIONnoisufnoc???”, but I digress. The opening song starts with (*gasp*) a piano sample playing (*GASP*) an arpeggio. Then, after a few repetitions, (*massive heart attack*) a clean guitar begins following the piano very badly while there's a sample of an e-mail about taking care of kids and hating the guts out of another person speaking on top. Randomly, the guitarist hits the distortion and begins to make some guitary noises. This whole sequence prolongs for the whole length of the e-mail about going to scouts with your son, giving guitar lessons, dance , and checking the daughter's FUCKING homework, before the whole thing settles down, leaving only the piano to play a few melancholic notes before being cut out mid-phrase, as a way to introduce the listener to the mega-dramatic death-metally / boring-beyond-comprehension introductory riff. And that's when the album begins to show off its extreme intensity and skull-crushing power by segueing into a post rock interlude for no apparent reason other than taking up space. Just as you start noticing how good Meatus are with post rock, the song cuts to a hip hop sample of someone saying “You don't like how I'm living, well, fuck you”, and we're back at the very uninteresting death metal. It takes one more introductory riff to actually get to the main theme, and all this amounts to an intro that in total takes up 3:30 minutes of the 7:56 minute song, and is completely unfulfilled.

All in all, the detours that are taken along the way eventually begin to sound like the band is making fun of you, and you wish they would stop doing them. But when the detours are not taken, the band has more of a chance to let shine through their complete inability to make a consistently engaging riff progression. A good example of this is “Ribo – Drugs Can't Erase The Memories”, which starts out relatively tolerable, until you realize that every single riff is a random combination of power chords an 11-year old could come up with by having a coughing fit, and that the order at which they're presented only makes them more torturous. The song is rendered even more terrible by the fact that every song prior and after that one is pretty much the same in that aspect. I think the fault here is of the guitars. They're so uninspired that they drag everyone else down to their level. The vocalist is quite skillful, the bass sometimes makes some cool chops and the drummer should have been looking for a better band in the first place, but the guitars are just lame! I think there are only about three worthwhile guitar parts in the whole album, and one of them sounds like the Batman theme.

I guess these guys were trying to out-weird and out-experimental everything else in existence and decided to do so in the cheapest, easiest and most gimmicky way possible. And I have to say that, in their own way, they have succeeded. Inner Demons IS absolutely bizarre. Its production is some of the most subtly perplexing I've heard yet, and the premise itself is a recipe for something of at least mild interest, meanwhile in execution it's even more tedious than James LaBrie's Elements of Persuasion. It really makes you stop and think, the way that something so chock-full of surprises and unexplained twists can sum up to something more boring than silence itself. How does that even work?! With this, my conclusion is the following: don't let my rating discourage you. Find this album and listen to it. If you have ever stopped to stare at a car accident, or considered doing so, this ought to spark your interest.



Standout tracks:

Spoken – ConfusionCONFUSIONnoisufnoc???