MASTIFF: “FOR ALL THE DEAD DREAMS”

(This is DGR‘s vivid review of a new Mastiff EP that’s set for release on October 24th by Church Road Records.)

Have you ever had a band that were perfect for ruining what would otherwise be a good day? A band that could drag you down into the depths of anger, violence, and misery no matter what in the world was happening outside? You could wake up and have everything be sunshine and rainbows, birds landing on your windowsill, all the animals of the forest resting kindly on your shoulder, and your beloved waiting just out of frame – only to put on a release by said group and have the whole feeling be annihilated and the skies darken around you?

What if we pitched the idea that sometimes that actually feels good in its own right? A weird sort of audio-masochism that works inversely to how your personality actually works? That we take this ugly music and it somehow gets us through the day no matter the situation. Propelled by either the sheer force of anger or the more nebulous ‘force of dumb’. That sometimes the artistic expulsion that helps them exorcise whatever demons might be bothering them works equally for us, calming anxiety and settling nerves.

No? Have you ever listened to the UK’s Mastiff, whose brand of sludge-infused hardcore is perfect for bullrushing whatever room you’re in and declaring, “Oh you thought things were going to be good today? Well, not on my watch!”

Mastiff‘s new EP For All The Dead Dreams picks up right where their previous release Deprecipice left off. If, somehow, you reached the end of that album and found yourself thinking “I could go for more of that, maybe with a little more of a bludgeoning ass-kicking applied to it,” then have Mastiff have got you covered with their new EP. Deprecipice on its own already did a fantastic job at just obliterating the mood around us; For All The Dead Dreams then proceeds to beat it to a pulp.

“Soliloquy”, the opener of For All The Dead Dreams, boils down to two major things: one excessively mean guitar riff and one of the gnarliest breakdowns that have hit in some time. Mastiff are intentionally ugly on all fronts, having used black metal as a weapon before and now verging closer to a more straightforward ass-kicking hardcore. The song is both punchy on its own and feels like being punched as well. It moves deftly from one rumbling rhythm to another for three-minutes-and-thirty-seconds of making any moment that is peaceful seem like a mirage in a desert.

“Rotting Blossoms” on the other hand, is in the vein of the quicker-moving chaotic two-step — something that groups like Trap Them would often play with — in its opening before Mastiff slam their feet on the ground and stop the whole song in its tracks for a hefty stomp of a verse. The first handful of songs on For All The Dead Dreams are built in this style of deceptively simple construction, but are some of the angriest and gnarled music out there.

We would be remiss to not touch on “Decimated Graves” though, which amplifies everything the previous songs did and turns the knob on brutality extra high. If you’ve ever wondered what Mastiff doing a blatant low-and-slow deathcore breakdown would sound like, the closing minute or so of “Decimated Graves” has more than enough of that on display. It is enough to cause a building to sink and collapse on its foundation.

Early in the song it may seem like you’re in for a bus ride of a mid-tempo stomp that occasionally lets the drummer blast his way through the mid-section, but the song does something that Dying Fetus do on their song “From Womb To Waste” in that it steadily gets slower and “dumber” as the song goes on. “Decimated Graves” already starts at caveman crushing rocks level of cro-magnon man songwriting, so can you only imagine how in the hell we’re going to have to describe that last two minutes of the song? Do we even have a scale that goes that low? Would a band be insulted if it were described as writing something akin to being one of the boiling primordial soups that were present on early-Earth? Can we somehow paint this as being like an extremophile bacteria surviving the depths of space by sheer will in its closing minute?

“A Story Behind Every Light” leaves no room to breathe in that aspect. The song picks up as if we’ve stumbled into the room and the band were already going. Any moment of rest from the song prior is proven to be an illusion as Mastiff are issuing forth another burly three-and-a-half-minute room-wrecking song. It isn’t a track that lays the groundwork for closer “Corporeal” either. It is its own issuance of weight-lifting riffs and crater-leaving stomps. Mastiff are a band that have had brawn before but it is on full display for the course of For All The Dead Dreams.

“Corporeal” closes events out and hammers that point home by being one of the shortest songs on this EP, and it’s the most straight-forward acid-wash of sludge that the band have here. You can’t walk away from this song without feeling like you dove headfirst into a pit of mud by the time it wraps up. You feel gross by the end of it, and the mood when the whole EP closes certainly doesn’t have one seeing the brighter side of life.

I have heard tales of people seeing bands while being unaware of what they sound like, and upon the first twenty seconds of the first song in their set doing the Ralph Wiggum “I’m In Danger” meme. Mastiff are that sort of band for me; an extended run through their collective works is like running through a crowd who are attempting to swing their mightiest punches at you at all times. The group use sludge as a weapon for atmospherics; rarely are they truly in the overwhelmingly slow groove on For All The Dead Dreams. Instead it’s that wash of distortion and reverb that seems to turn the songs into something like standing in the middle of a blast furnace so that even when they’re at their most -core, it just comes off as oppressively heavy.

For All The Dead Dreams is a brutally violent twenty minutes. It is Mastiff in microcosm and at their burliest, and it makes for a fantastic EP to ruin just about any day if you feel things are just going way too smoothly.

https://mastiffhchc.bandcamp.com/album/for-all-the-dead-dreams
http://facebook.com/mastiffhchc
https://www.instagram.com/mastiffhchc