(This is DGR’s review of the latest album from a Fort Worth band who now call themselves Asylum TX.)
Texas-based tech-death group Asylum – now operating under the name Asylum TX – are a band we’ve been following for some time now, iInitially as a group that showed a surprising amount of promise from seemingly out of nowhere in the death metal world, but then afterward because the group’s music kept making strange twists and turns.
Where Asylum TX were looking to take their music was not something we would have expected or guessed. 2021’s Sharpen, for instance, is a lengthy album that treads the line between tech-death and something more amateurishly explorative of various forms of hallucinogens. It was an hour-plus worth of music that felt like a group of stellar musicians who had fallen into a weird Alex Grey by way of Tool rabbit hole and then taking the wildest swing at making a death metal album about it. Prior EPs and their 2017 album Psalms Of Paralysis had been more straightforward in that regard, as Asylum bore the marks of more than one Cattle Decapitation-influenced twist on their sound.
Five years removed from Sharpen, however, and Asylum – again, wearing a new visage as Asylum TX – once again sound as if they’re a completely different band who’ve come up with something far more angular in its approach than a traditional tech-death release for their newest album Cultus Inoxia.
Cultus Inoxia stands in pretty *cough* sharp contrast to their Sharpen album from five years ago. Although Sharpen was recorded as if the concept of music would never exist again and weighed in at eleven songs for a staggering hour and twenty minutes worth of music, Cultus Inoxia is only seven explorative numbers instead, with one being an interstitial-worthy minute-fifty closing track and three others being singles they had released in the time between full-lengths. Cultus Inoxia is only thirty-one minutes, much closer to Psalms Of Paralysis if they’d had time for one more track, so the actual meat of the album comes from the fact that songs are anywhere between three and eight minutes in length.
Asylum TX sound much slimmer in their ambitions as a result, paring the band down from gargantuan and grandiose numbers of sweeping death metal into songs consisting of three or four elements and then surgically cut off at the neck by the end. It is only when song lengths get more indulgent at the end of Cultus Inoxia that Asylum TX start to resemble the rabid Asylum of old – which is interesting given that their lineup has held surprisingly stable save for a new drummer taking over the spot in 2024.
The manic energy that has long possessed the Asylum inmates remains unchanged, and their Cultus Inoxia album bounces about with that same ideal in mind. Albums will sometimes develop unintentional blocks or suites within their music sequencing, but that doesn’t happen on Cultus Inoxia. Songs are placed in a wild scatter-plot of song lengths and as a result Cultus Inoxia veers about like a charged atom, colliding with everything in its area and shooting off in unexpected directions.
There’s a lot of ingredients in Cultus Inoxia’s pot as well, as Asylum TX take after many of their peers currently, wherein it’s not just a tech-death album but a creature that has its tentacles in multiple pools. There’s elements of black metal shrieking taken from the vocal work as well as the occasional guitar-lead and lyrical-inspiration – the reactionary gothic-drama most evident in opener “Nacazcul” for example – and not even a song later Asylum TX are neck deep in the waters of red-tinged progressive death wanderings in “Blast Femur”. You’d figure that would be the song with the short run time but “Blast Femur” alone hits the speed-radar for seven-minutes-and-twenty seconds.
Asylum TX still have their aspirations for using thrash guitar riffs as well; a song like the sub-three minutes of “Tachycardia” smashes a few of them into the background of the song, while the vocals continue a gods-be-damned act of trying to stuff as much as they can within one sentence – resulting in a weirdly overdone song that is interesting, as it seems to be barely holding itself together at the seams.
Then the band buries another tech-death and progressive death metal car crash like “Shock” later on in the album just to continue to catch people off guard. The song shunts its way through a wild mix of death and grind before drifting into melodic territory as if trying to chart a whole valley’s worth. Asylum TX decided they couldn’t pin any one element down apparently, so they just became all of them in the course of two large songs like “Shock” and the mid-tempo twisting of the titular “Cultus Inoxia”.
Cultus Inoxia saw release at the end of March this year and in that span of time has been like a weird gremlin, resting nearby and speaking up to demand attention at the oddest of times. Much like Asylum TX’s previous releases, it is a wildly ambitious yet wildly unpolished release. Many people will complain about how some groups are clean to the point of sounding sterile yet this band have none of that in their sound, much less their approach to songwriting.
Music on Cultus Inoxia takes bizarre and sudden turns out of nowhere and runs in other unexpected directions, as if Asylum TX themselves were constantly in pursuit of a different thing while barely catching up to the current one they had just set their focus on. It makes Cultus Inoxia an oddly exciting album if not equally oddly unapproachable. It is thirty-four-and-a-half minutes of rabid and raving wanderings from a band with so many ideas in play that limiting themselves to the seven songs here feels oddly unfair.
The reckless abandon with which Asylum TX seem to approach their eldritch-nightmare of a tech-death formula is what makes listening to an album like Cultus Inoxia interesting, even as it misses just as many punches as it lands.
https://asylumtx.bandcamp.com/album/cultus-inoxia
https://www.instagram.com/asylumtx
https://www.facebook.com/AsylumTX/