Mondays tend to be morbid days for many of us. Maybe our asses are dragging from a weekend drowned in excesses of various kinds and not enough sleep. Maybe we’re staring at the face of an ugly job, knowing that there’s five days of them standing in a nasty gauntlet ahead of us. Motivation might be in short supply, and over-stuffed pessimism riding you like a sway-backed mule.
But don’t lose hope, there’s an antidote for this Monday: an opportunity to stick your head into a sonic blast furnace that will at least temporarily incinerate your woes (and your clothing and flesh). And even if you’re actually looking forward to the start of a new work week, what you’re about to hear will give it the kind of kick-start otherwise available only from a syringe of adrenaline plunged into your carotid artery.
To fulfill that promise we have the premiere of not one but two tracks from The Weight of Being, a new album by the explosive New Jersey grindcore band Organ Dealer, which will be fully detonated by Everlasting Spew Records on July 28th.
This new album didn’t come easy. Reading what Organ Dealer have said about it, it sounds like the band had to fight their way through a horde of bastards to get it made (and maybe that made the music even meaner):
“This album was long in the making for us. It was written during a time of extreme uncertainties. First we were down a guitar player and shortly after we began the writing process, Covid hit and the world shut down.
“We had about half the album done by then but the rest of the process proved difficult with just Eric and Jeff meeting up and sneaking into the practice space whenever possible. On top of this, in the middle of the pandemic, Jeff and Eric’s apartment burned down in June.
“However, this only made us more determined than ever with nothing to look forward to other than finishing this record. It really was our only outlet and escape from the collapsing world around us. Laced with razor sharp riffs and a shower of blast beats. Kevin Bernstein [Misery Index, Full Of Hell, Noisem] was at the helm. We’re relieved it’s finally finished and happy to share with everyone what we’ve been working on.”
There’s 21 tracks on The Weight of Being. As promised, the stream below includes two of them. The first one is “Panoramic“, but since it’s less than 50 seconds long the title may seem confounding — unless you think of it as a panorama of a nuclear blast-front experienced at ground level. The hyper-speed drumming is obliterating. The riffing both scathes and slashes, creating an experience both violent and thuggish. The tag-team vocal tandem maniacally screams and brutishly bellows.
Maybe by now you’re ducking and covering, but it’s too late. “Solitude Is Death” erupts next with barely a pause. It’s almost twice as long, but no less decimating. If anything, the rapidly writhing guitars make it sound even more deranged, and the vocals are possibly even more maniacally slaughtering. Of course, the drums sound like a heavy-caliber machine gun going so fast it’s about to melt down.
So there you go. The day already seems better, eh? And of course nothing’s stopping you from just hitting play over and over again to keep all the wolves at bay.
ORGAN DEALER recording line-up:
Eric Schnee – Drums
Jeff Knoblauch – Guitar
Trevor Graham – Bass, Vocals
Scot Moriarty – Vocals
New Vocalist: Chris Ward
The band also had some guests on the new album: Lex from Sunrot providing additional vocals on “Solitude Is Death“; Sebastian Phillips from Exhumed/Noisem cooking up a guitar solo on “Endless Despondence“; Ben Anft from Noisem contributing additional vocals on that same song; and Jocke Svensson & Elis Edin Markskog (Birdflesh) adding vocals on “Stagnant Reality“.
As mentioned in the previous Organ Dealer comment, The Weight Of Being was recorded and mixed by Kevin Bernsten at Developing Nations in Baltimore. James Plotkin handled the mastering, and Arif Rot/Rotworks created the cover art.
Everlasting Spew will release the record on CD, tape, and digital formats, with a vinyl edition coming in autumn 2023. They recommend it for fans of Nasum, Napalm Death, Wormrot, and Nails.
PRE-ORDER:
https://everlastingspewrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-weight-of-being
ORGAN DEALER:
https://www.facebook.com/OrganDealer