ORGAN DEALER: “THE WEIGHT OF BEING”

(Here’s DGR’s review of Organ Dealer’s new album, which is out now on Everlasting Spew Records.)

Organ Dealer‘s summer drop of The Weight Of Being was a long time coming. Though the band never stopped per se, subsisting on a series of splits and singles since the release of their 2015 album Visceral Infection, there still exists a near eight-year gap for the band’s full-length material.

Organ Dealer, of course, have been through some changes in that time and what you’re hearing on The Weight Of Being is almost like a recorded journey of every change that has happened in the time since Visceral Infection dropped – including the current (because nothing is forever) last stint of belfry-shrieker Scot Moriarty on the vocals front.

The Weight Of Being picks up right where Visceral Infection effectively stopped dead in its tracks via sheer immolation/crashing-into-side-of-building combination and kicks things into high gear from moment one. You’d honestly never guess that there’d been a huge gap in time for the band because it is the most recognizably Organ Dealer branch of grindcore-madness you could’ve expected. All energy, zero thought, and a whole lot of flailing limbs for twenty-one tracks and twenty-three minutes of material. You don’t even need to hear the music really to just know by the tale of the tape the sort of blistering audio-inferno that is going to be tossed your way.

If you’re not familiar with the Organ Dealer crew or their aforementioned branch of the grindcore tree the best way to describe their style of music would be ‘manic’. Organ Dealer are a ton of energy being released all at once and they almost never stop. Songs dart about and flicker from place to place like moths that’ve been set aflame, and some last just about as long.

The band trends very ‘high’ in writing style, so if you’re a fan of the side of grind that bears resemblance towards a ravenous animal more than the sort of sewage dwelling or bass-heavy groups, then you’ll likely find appeal here. If nothing else, Organ Dealer are not a friendly first experience and though it seems like we’re joking when we say that listening to them is like having your face seared off, The Weight Of Being is more than happy to provide that sense within its first five songs.

Organ Dealer only get close to kissing the two-minute mark twice on The Weight Of Being, so it’s perfectly fitting – not just a cheekier acknowledgement – that they have a song early in the tracklisting that is just called “White-Hot Noise”. Very rarely do you get self-reflection like that within the bounds of a grind disc. In spite of how close the band hew towards manic grind standards, and likewise making the The Weight Of Being sound like a matured version of their first full-length, there is the occasional surprise.

Because otherwise, The Weight Of Being is an enjoyable blast of grindcore that is basically shrieking madness from the word ‘go’. Things move very, very, very – not to put too fine a point on this – fast on The Weight Of Being and songs both start/stop at about the same velocity as the one that went before it. It’s a mean album that covers a wide swath of grindcore staples from the social, political, socio-political, inward-looking, and just otherwise awful imagined scenarios realm. The band cover a lot of ground and do so while leaving flaming tracks behind them.

The way the band whip through every song until slamming into “Shelted Privilege” at track nine, burning through songs like “Seemingly Futile” and “Misdirected Suffering”, is something to behold on its own. “Ignite Everything” even goes for the six-second over-and-done trick that so many grind bands have pulled off over the years – somehow firing off fourteen words in the span of time it takes for a firework to shoot into the air and explode. “Recurrence Of Nightmares” by scraping up against the one-minute-fifty-second mark near the end of the album would almost appear like a doom song by comparison if it weren’t for the fact that Organ Dealer kind-of morph into a quick-moving death-metal band in order to make a track last that long.

The Weight Of Being is a lot like being picked up by a giant and whipped around from one side of the room to the other. Organ Dealer mainting a frighteningly fast tempo throughout, and much as it seems that you as a listener can’t catch your breath, neither does it seem like the band afford themselves an opportunity to do so either.

It’s hard to believe that such a decent clip of time between the bands two full-lengths has passed because without knowing that there were splits and singles in the interim, it would just seem like Organ Dealer have a habit of lighting themselves on fire and finding the tallest hill in the city to launch themselves down every couple of years, with the ending of the album playing out like the result you’d expect, just a burning husk screeching to a stop at the bottom with only the occasional passerby raising an eyebrow and wondering ‘what in the unholy fuck was that?’

https://everlastingspewrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-weight-of-being
https://www.facebook.com/OrganDealer