AN NCS PREMIERE: DISGUSTINGEST — “DIGITAL CYST”

“Brutal slamming deathcore” is the shorthand for this music, displayed in all its ghastly gnarliness and pulverizing thuggishness across five tracks on the new EP, which total about 11 minutes. In the first four of these obviously compact tracks, including the one we’re premiering, Disgustingest deploy similar ingredients (the fifth one is a very different experience, which we’ll get too).

The vocals are the most disgusting component, a vile guttural gurgling that makes one imagine frothing sewage and filthy, swirling drains. Deeper still are enormous slamming detonations, like the rhythmic explosion of megaton bombs, with the traumatic impact of their immensity enhanced by bass-drops that are even more staggeringly heavy.

On the other end of the sonic range, the snare drum pops like gunfire reverberating within storm pipes, sometimes blasting in full-auto mode, sometimes snapping like a metronome, sometimes erupting in acrobatic fills.

In between on the range, the riffing attacks with scouring abrasion, like circle saws revved up to the max. They operate in different ways, sometimes dismally swarming and writhing, sometimes sounding like giant sewing machines rapidly stitching steel into concrete blocks (maybe so the blocks won’t fly completely apart when the slam-bombs hit them), sometimes brutally slashing in augmentation of those bass-driven slams, sometimes maniacally quivering and convulsing. Other forms of guitar torture leap from the speakers, with strings squealing and screaming (the vocals do that too).

In incorporating these elements, Disgustingest keep listeners off-balance by repeatedly changing tempos — and changing them quickly and sharply. They tend to suddenly slow the pace when inflicting those pulverizing slams, and sometimes they slow down even further, as if carefully making sure that no desperate life forms will be able to squirm out of the way.

Disgustingest also spin the “groove dial” pretty high. Regardless of speed, all the sonic implements of torture, war, and putrescence in these songs are rhythmically structured to get listeners’ muscles moving.

At a couple of points in those first four songs the sounds briefly become eerily strange – at the end of “Membrane Fabricator” and at the beginning of “Hallucinogenic Necrosis”. And the final track, “Fragments of the Self“, is the strangest of all, an entirely instrumental piece that oozes swirling electronic radiations around growling bass chugs and snappy, bounding beats.