(Because Islander is goofing off at the NCS-sponsored Northwest Terror Fest this weekend, we won’t have his usual weekend columns, but we will have some reviews by DGR, including this one devoted to a new album by Houston-based Architectural Genocide.)
It took way too long to achieve this monk-like state of enlightenment but listening to Architectural Genocide’s newest release Malignant Cognition via Comatose Music all the way back in the middle of January, revealed that perhaps twenty-three minutes is the exact amount of this style of brutal death metal that you need in your life.
The Texas-based four piece have stumbled upon lightning in a bottle when it comes to perfect album length for this level of single-minded brutality, and that length does seem to about twenty-three minutes. It is a signifier of two things: Architectural Genocide don’t have much thought nor care about seeking past the boundaries of complete – and sometimes unnecessary – violence; and they know when they’ve said all they need to say and will cut a song off right then instead of exploring further into other territories.
If your goal was to knock down a building and then by the two minute mark you’ve knocked down a building, what the hell are you sticking around for? Job is done, get the fuck out. Architectural Genocide deserve commendation for this level of single-minded and surgical brutality, and Malignant Cognition is a good example of how to set a track record on annihilating a city that sits before you.
Architectural Genocide are from the school of brutal death wherein the vocal work sounds like a sped-up recording of two tectonic plates rubbing together, backed by a guitar that is being peeled apart piece by piece, and a drum kit so overly caffeinated that even the slightest movement will rattle off three or four hits in the span of a half second.
That means the songs here are less straightforward composition and a lot more forward motion by sheer force and weight. Architectural Genocide don’t have to worry about transitioning between segments or stitching riffs together because each song on Malignant Cognition is only comprised of four to five segments and those are brought together by collision; whatever jumbled mess of limbs that sticks together just happens to be what the next song is, so that once you get past the introductory “Prelude To Bloodshed”, everything following is decay, gore, and rot.
Only the sharpest of grooves and the meanest of leads are allowed on Malignant Cognition while Architectural Genocide go target-shooting through all of brutal death metal’s tropes on songs like “Leave It To Cleaver”, “Trophies For My Murders”, and “Malicious Wager”. Songs will often change speed in order to turn into big, thudding groove chunks that march the music ever onward with little taste for subtlety.
Sometimes everything between those knuckle-dragging sections of death metal exists solely as the sound of the aforementioned collision of noise that results in weird, discordant collections of limbs in song form. Architectural Genocide are essentially mashing corpses together and calling the sound music.
Perfectly fitting for death metal in its most slam-adjacent form then; every bit of existence is done in service and worship of brutality. Summoning the monster of PeelingFlesh’s Damonteal Harris to tag along closer to the end of the album on “Zed Requiem”? Done so in order to make sure that the song doesn’t just reach the finish line by running on its fists, but vaults over it and rams into a car in the parking lot.
And as stated above, going a hair over twenty-three minutes is perfect for an album like Malignant Cognition. Eight songs that stick pretty rigidly to a near-grindcore philosophy of attack, roar, out, is a well-executed idea, and most of the tracks here stay at a steady two and a half to three minute range. Were it not for the band getting slightly indulgent at the end of Malignant Cognition, they would’ve likely closed out even earlier with a more molten energy than what they do here.
Extending out into the four-minute range by the briefest of segments the one time they do it makes the song feel as if it is a fully (de)composed dedication to the end of mortality. To reiterate, this happens one time. Otherwise, Architectural Genocide are hitting hard and moving even faster over the course of Malignant Cognition. An album so singularly focused that after eight songs it severs its run time, leaving a crater in the ground where it once rested.
https://comatosemusic.bandcamp.com/album/malignant-cognition
https://www.facebook.com/architecturalgenocide/