The last time we premiered music from the Australian death metal band Carcinoid was four years ago, the occasion being the run-up toward their album Metastatic Declination. Back then we urged you to “prepare your hardened ears for a mutated offspring of death and doom that’s as foul as a rotting corpse, as punishing as a jackhammer applied to the spine, and as horrifying as a runaway cancer”.
Since then Carcinoid have released a couple of splits, and now they’re returning with a new record named Encomium to Extinction, which brings five new tracks and nearly half an hour of total music, thanks to an evil conspiracy between Me Saco Un Ojo Records and Headsplit Records.
Once again we have a premiere, and this time our best advice is to get your fucking necks loose.
At one point in “Morbid Curse” Carcinoid do drag listeners into a gruesome sonic charnel house, the bass morbidly clanging, filthy chords dragging and groaning, and the lead-guitar sickeningly mewling and screaming, but for most of its duration this track is a full-throttle bludgeoner.
The song challenges us to come up with the right metaphors for the ruinous but highly infectious beatings it administers. With stringed instruments tuned to mangling levels of distortion and percussive discharges that resemble mortar fire, the band launch the song in start-stop bursts of brutish hammering – segmented by expulsions of vocal vomit — and from there the hammering continues with no remorse, like the charge of some humongous hell-machine, punctuated by demented, whining fretwork pulsations and monstrous growling barks.
And so the song is both crushing and frantic. It also convulses in frenzied swarms as the drums chop at the neck like a spring-loaded ax and scamper about like a feral animal in heat, and the vocals elevate into ghastly shrieks.
Yes it’s nasty and gnarly and viciously destructive, but it’s also guaranteed to appear on a certain year-end list at our putrid site, one that’s devoted to… infectiousness.
Well, if that has whetted your appetite for Carcinoid, and surely it has, then move right on to the first single from the album, “Led to the Worms“. It too is capable of battering listeners senseless and taking a few inches off their height as it pounds them into the earth.
It too is also as diseased as it is devastating — and it too makes a bass-led detour into foul, putrefying sonic recesses. Of course, the vocals are also authentically hideous.
Be led to the worms, and feel them feed….
Encomium to Extinction is scheduled for release on November 16th. Me Saco Un Ojo will provide the vinyl LP version, and Headsplit will release it on CD and cassette tape formats.
PRE-ORDER:
https://mesacounojo.bandcamp.com/album/encomium-to-extinction
HEADSPLIT:
https://headsplitrecords.storenvy.com/
CARCINOID:
https://www.facebook.com/carcinoiddeathdoom