AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HORSE BUTCHER — “HORSE BUTCHER”

(written by Islander)

It’s not enough that a particularly dismal and disgusting year on Earth will soon gasp its last rotten and rattling breath — Horse Butcher have arisen to murder it with one of the most vicious and mind-mauling releases of the last 12 months. It’s as if they decided this bastard year didn’t deserve to live even another two weeks.

Given how often our putrid glorious site throws emotionally and aurally assaulting sounds at visitors, it may seem like an exaggeration to say that about Horse Butcher‘s self-titled EP. Trust me, it’s no exaggeration.

Sentient Ruin Laboratories, which will release the EP on December 20th, also isn’t exaggerating when they call the record “a disfigured onslaught of gore-fucked bestial deathgrind worshipping directly at the altar of Carcass, Archgoat, Disgorge, Impetigo and Pissgrave” — “six tracks and twenty minutes of neanderthalian carnage and slaughterhouse madness.”

But you’ll see this for yourselves right quick because today we’re hosting the EP’s premiere.

Only in the realms of extreme metal could it be a compliment to accuse a band of rendering a “scum-fucking level of vile barbarism and inhumanity” (more words from Sentient Ruin). It’s always a fun challenge (always doomed to failure) to try to explain that to members of the surface-dwelling public, and especially to people who think the world is humming along just the way it should.

It makes more sense to people who are disgusted, horrified, enraged, and generally repulsed by their fellow human beings’ cruelty and indifference to cruelty. Based on their music, that’s where Horse Butcher are coming from. How they express that is the result of members of the unorthodox Seattle band Hissing turning their tastes for the surreal and the experimental in more ruthlessly sadistic directions.

Horse Butcher begin testing the limits of their listeners’ endurance and sanity with “Pathogenic Attenuation,” one of the two longest songs on the album (the other one, even longer, comes at the end). There, grisly rhythmic gasps lead into gnashing, slashing, and maniacally swarming riffage tuned to tones of sandblasting and sewage, backed by magma-like bass lines and constantly varying drum attacks. The gasps don’t stop, but are joined by malignant howls.

It’s a dense and destructively abrasive experience, but it’s also intricate, laced with a multitude of contorted riffs and freakishly swirling guitar-leads. Even as the drums are furiously hammering, the music also dismally clangs like chains dropping on torture-chamber concrete.

The following three songs are shorter, but no less demented and deviant, no less corrosive but also no less kaleidoscopic. As in the first song, Horse Butcher also bring in bursts of slashing groove and head-hammering beats, but they also drag the listener into further episodes of nightmarish hopelessness. At times, even the shrill and screeching solos sound like despair — white hot in their agony.

While the main line of the songs is usually a malicious swarm of tremolo’d ferocity and weaponized percussion, the band keep switching things up in different ways, including rapid tempo changes, quick stops and starts, less-assaulting episodes of chilling strangeness, and even moments geared to triggering the headbang reflex.

Because of its 5 1/2 minute length, the EP closer “Sterilant Abuse” is the most expansive display of all these maneuvers. It also includes the slowest, most brutally hopeless, and most thoroughly disgusted phase of music on the EP — though it ends with one more mind-rending instrumental paroxysm.

And so, while it’s true that the music is vile, bestial, and barbaric, it turns out to be kind of dazzling too, not just slaughtering and soul-sucking but also scintillating. Gird your loins and see for yourselves:

The hideous cover-art collage for Horse Butcher‘s debut EP was created by Adam Medford, and the record was mastered by Dan Lowndes (of Cruciamentum). As noted above, it’s set for worldwide release by Sentient Ruin on December 20th, on CD, MC, and digital formats, all of which are now available for pre-order via the channels linked below.

PRE-ORDER:
► https://sentientruin.bandcamp.com​​​​
► http://sentientruin.com/releases

Fun experiment: Share that cover art on your social media and time how long it takes the platform to consign you to virtual purgatory.