(DGR has conceived lots of ways of expressing just how crushing and destructive the new album from the multi-national group CHESTCRUSH really is, and they’re all laid out before you below.)
It is not uncommon for a metal band to ruminate on the concept of hate when the spectre of subject matter for an album arises. Hate is metal’s territory; it is logical for the musical drive of the extreme to tilt in such an extreme emotion’s direction. The force of hate as a concept is that it grabs hold of a human being like nothing else, refusing to let go. Whole personalities can be mutated by it, and if you’ve ever worried that our species hadn’t basically signed its own death warrant from the beginning, bear in mind just how well hate can grab hold of people.
The joyous moments of life are ephemeral and drift through memory; they are life as it should be, but the darker moments hover above us for eternities. Grudges can be held for lifetimes and generations. Hate can fester and turn into a cancerous ball that kills its host, snuffing out any potential for good being done in the world in favor of endless bleakness.
While many bands use hate and misanthropy as inspiration, few among the thousands that grace us with their presence each day have truly captured the oppressive weight that such an emotion can place upon a person. The utter disdain for anything in existence can often lead a group astray into carnival sideshow territory just as easily as it can serve as the spark for an auditory conflagration.
International death metal project ChestCrush — with its main project owner Evangelos Vasilakos currently based in Scotland, their vocalist Topias Jokipii hailing from Finland, and Australia’s own journeyman drummer Robin Stone (whose credits currently stretch far and wide, though we’ll happily highlight the time spent in avant-garde industrial black metal oddballs The Amenta any chance we can get) providing the rhythm segment — are one of the few groups that have truly mastered utter disdain and misanthropy in musical form, distilling it into one of the most dense sounds to emerge from the blackened death metal realms in recent years.
The group’s newest album Ψυχοβγάλτης — translated: “Soul Extractor” — is the band’s second album, following their EP Apechtheia in 2022 and debut release Vdelygmia in 2021. ChestCrush‘s releases have been harrowing journeys as they’ve steadily honed their craft into something more lethal each trip around. Vdelygmia boosted the group off into an impressive position from the start but each subsequent record has only seen ChestCrush seemingly get meaner and meaner — which is how the group’s newest album has them moving from blunted song titles into wordy exhortations against the outside world.
Targeted and exceedingly violent, Ψυχοβγάλτης is an immense evolution of the ChestCrush sound — which should hopefully help contextualize how the band moved from having a title like “Different Shepherd, Same Sheep” for the second song on their first-full length and four years later christening the second song on the newest one “We Shall Be Devoured by the Offspring of Our Own Flesh”.
Ψυχοβγάλτης is similar to ChestCrush‘s first album Vdelygmia in that it is a collection of shorter ‘songs’ as opposed to Apechtheia and its three incredibly dense ten-minute-plus tracks. You’d never really notice this given just how gargantuan all these songs come across during Ψυχοβγάλτης, but most of the songs here hover at about the four-and-a-half minute mark. Given how packed they are musically, you can now see why some of the titles can be overwhelmingly worthy. It’s long been a mission of ChestCrush to overwhelm, and it seems by their sophomore album that they’ve more than achieved that objective. Songs leave mammoth footfalls behind them with each groove punctuated by downward thrust; were this a martial art it would be one solely fought with construction equipment and jackhammers.
“Underneath This Rotten Soil Bodies Are Still Bleeding” is a five-minute tutorial in how ferocious ChestCrush aim to be this time, and they don’t deviate too much from the patterns laid out during its five minutes. This is a collection of heavy roars, bellowing so low they shake the foundations of skyscrapers. The headbanging rhythm throughout the opening song is driven more by how the guitar work seems to shift downwards as if hammering the song into the dirt. The bevy of snare-drum blasting likely also had the stand it sits on embedded a few inches into the floor by the time this one wrapped up; there’s no telling whether or not it was fully dug into the ground by the time “Existence Is Punishment” rears its snarling head.
While it is endlessly amusing to dive into the heftier and less-subtle songs on ChestCrush‘s latest foray — we couldn’t not acknowledge something like “Every Single Word That Comes Out Of Your Filthy Hole Is An Infectious Lie Spreading Disease”, which only loses out to Nile‘s latest ‘song title as olympic event’ on The Underworld Awaits Us All by five words — we’d be remiss if we failed to glance at the finality that takes place in songs like “Total Rejection” and “Hang Them! Torch Them!”.
Neither propose pleasant things for either the listener or their subject matter. “Total Rejection” is the more compact of the two, though neither could be easily described as the quicker songs of this album. ChestCrush‘s musical force is one driven by collapsing walls, and by the point in the album when this dastardly pair arrive you’ve already had the equivalent of a city falling atop you.
“Total Rejection” carries with it a storm cloud that dumps a year’s worth of misery in four minutes. It is constructed mostly around a brutal-death-metal chug but the grinding buzzsaw influence is undeniable as the song descends into rapid-noise at times and then quickly reconstructs itself as a fortress of double-bass rolls during its chorus. It may have the benefit of being the most easily understood headbanging-wise across the whole album, which may lend it to being one of the more constantly played. Taken as a whole by this point in the album you’ve already been worn down to dust — which may be what ChestCrush were aiming for anyway.
“Hang Them! Torch Them” is impressive largely on the vocal front, wherein vocalist Topias Jokipii leans heavily on higher screams that’ve been interweaving their way throughout this album as a whole. They’re jammed into that song with the force of a head-on collision and the whole song and its anthemic calls for destruction are the last time when Ψυχοβγάλτης is straightforward in its violence — because follower “As the Damned Writhe in Eternal Woe” is a seven and a half minute hybrid of brutal-death, sludge, grind, and nightmarish hybridization that assures you nothing on this album will be ending on a glorious or beautiful moment. This is a thing that has emerged from the darkness, and its final song is a claw reaching out from behind other dimensions to drag it back in when all that is to be said has been uttered. The ringing of the church bells should serve as signal to the monstrous summoning to take place within.
The weight of the material on ChestCrush‘s latest offering unto the darkness is immense. This is a project that is single-minded in its goals of destruction and disgust in equal measure, such that the handful of songs highlighted here and the near forty minutes of material that make up their newest soul extraction can be like having a street-paving machine slowly roll over you. Like Apechtheia before it, ChestCrush do their damage because Evan and his fellow cohorts are at an expert level of death metal bludgeoning.
This is an album where breaking songs out as separate experiences may help the listening experience the first time, solely due to how each one is a mangled mass of tortured guitar, abyssal vocal work, and machine-gun drumming. The sense of groove that defined the days of “Different Shepherd Same Sheep” back in 2021 is ever-present but ChestCrush have grown more as a project, and as a result the brutality is more multi-layered. This isn’t just one forty-pound sledgehammer landing on the listener’s skull over and over, it’s multiple ones and done sequentially.
ChestCrush never quite devolve to the level of their air-compressor and brad-nailer-armed abyssal death metal brethren; this is a project that is doing well straddling the lines across multiple genre fronts like an ominous shadow that no one dares walk closer to in order to find out what really lies within. Ψυχοβγάλτης is a maelstrom missive of metamorphosing and maniacal misanthropy that will continue to impress upon multiple listens.
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