(written by Islander)
If you’ve ever listened to the music of the German band Teratoma, as first captured in their 2021 debut album Purulent Manifestations, you know their choice of band name wasn’t some random shot in the dark. They clearly searched for a real-world representation of the hideous ghastliness they sought to channel in their death metal, and they found the teratoma tumor to be suitably horrid. (FYI, the term comes from the Greek word for “monster” plus the “-oma” suffix used for tumors.)
But even within their debut album Teratoma’s brand of death metal manifested other aspects of monstrosity besides sensations of horrid disease and blood-congealing creepiness. Like the tumor whose name they chose, the music was abominably multi-faceted.
Their new album, Longing Voracity, further expands those other aspects, as the album’s title itself foretells, and we have a prime example of what they’ve achieved achieves through our premiere of the album’s closing track “Stertorous Whisper“.
Oh to be sure, the song is monstrous from moment one. The drums vigorously hack like a dismembering ax. The gruesomely distorted riffing seems to lurch and lunge. The guttural vocals bellow from abyssal depths, and the bass gnaws and undulates through even deeper frequencies.
But the riffing also undergoes voracious convulsions, and a lead guitar insanely screams and weirdly contorts. The music also ruthlessly pounds (creating back-breaking grooves), brazenly blares, swarms in hideous feeding frenzies, and excretes sonic pestilence.
Further musical mutations occur past the song’s mid-point. The pace slows to a crawl, the percussion crashes and booms, and the music slithers in hopelessness, slowly oozing a musical hook of desolating misery — followed by an outburst of decimating (but thrilling) chaos.
At the end, the song becomes weirdly atmospheric, very strange indeed, as if we’ve parted a veil into an otherworldly dimension that puts a cold sweat on the skin. (“Stertorous”, by the way, is defined as an adjective that describes loud and labored breathing, a kind of harsh gasping, and that closing phase suits the word.)
Longing Voracity will be released by the esteemed Me Saco Un Ojo label on March 25th, on vinyl LP, CD, and digital formats. Find pre-orders via the link below — and at that location you can also hear two other previously released album tracks, the opener “Exordium” and the title song “Longing Voracity“.
PRE-ORDER:
https://mesacounojo.bandcamp.com/album/longing-voracity
TERATOMA:
https://www.facebook.com/teratomaberlin