SHORT BUT SWEET: ABSOLUTISM / CAR BOMB / NEFAS

(Andy Synn presents three mind-warping metallic morsels to bruise and bludgeon your brains)

Some of you may have noticed (or maybe you didn’t?) that I didn’t post anything here last week, mostly because I was snowed under with work/life/band stuff and just couldn’t find the time (or the mental energy) to put my thoughts (as scrambled as they were) down in any coherent order.

To rectify that, however, I spent some time over the weekend putting together a bunch of reviews… although, wouldn’t you know it, pretty much all the bands I’ve ended up writing about have been so dizzyingly, discombobulatingly technical and intense that they’ve ended up scrambling my brain all over again.

So if you enjoyed Monday’s dissection of the upcoming new album from Sallow Moth and are looking for a few more meaty morsels to satisfy your cravings for chaotic complexity, then you’ll want to give all three of these EPs a listen too.

ABSOLUTISM – STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Look, I know it can be a bit… reductive… to compare one band to another, but it can also be pretty useful.

So when I say that Absolutism‘s new EP sits somewhere between Aborted at their techiest and Wormed at their grindiest (or vice versa) I’m hoping that it serves as a good starting point on which to build your expectations, rather than an overly-simplified end point to this little review.

Opener “Devious Ontogeny” wastes very little time getting going… a few bars of scene-setting sci-fi ambience, a couple of chunky chugs, and then we’re hit with a laser-guided barrage of machine-like percussion, churning, chattering guitar work, and volatile, cybernetically-enhanced vocals, all interspersed with sudden flashes of twisted technicality, spiky dissonance, and slam-tastic, slow-motion heaviness… after which the title-track pushes the needle even further into the red with even more sweeping shreddery and dissonant anti-hooks.

Yes, occasionally the band blaze through things so fast that there’s a danger of them going in one ear and straight out of the other (proggy instrumental “Dark Hemispheres” in particular burns through so many different melodic and metallic ideas in such a short space of time that most of them don’t really have time to land), but the stoping, strafing, stabbing strains of the Benighted-esque “Nebulae Dominate” and the utterly monstrous three minute (and thirteen second) thrill-ride of “Accretion Divine” definitely possess enough vicious, virulently infectious hooks (of the harsh and heavy variety) to ensure they’ll catch your attention… and hopefully keep it until whatever the band come up with next comes along!

CAR BOMB – TILES WHISPER DREAMS

There are certain bands out there whose sound I can instantly recognise after hearing less than a two second sample of their music – and the explosive assault on the senses of Car Bomb is definitely one of them.

Picking up right where 2019’s absolutely outstanding Mordial left off (read more about it here, if you haven’t already), but immediately showcasing an even more precise and powerful production job that makes the band sound even more like they’re from the future, “Blindsides” is just under five minutes of erratic, percussive chuggery and stretched-out, time-warping chord sequences – topped off with an apoplectically intense vocal performance and interspersed with moments of strange, almost dreamlike melody and off-kilter technical wizardry (keep an ear open for some subtly slinky bass work) – whose mix of inhuman precision and combustive energy remains a step beyond, and above, the reach of most of the group’s relatively small circle of peers.

“Paroxysm” then packs all these elements and influences – breaking down and mashing up bits and pieces of Meshuggah, Deftones, Converge, and more, and then giving the resultant product a total remix through the lens of artists like Aphex Twin and Autecre – into an even more tightly-wound, sub-two-minute, package (and we all know what happens when you pack this much explosive material together into an increasingly small space, right?) after which the crushingly heavy, convulsively groovy title-track opts for a surprisingly catchy (and, at times, almost thrashy) approach that makes the whole song feel like a carefully crafted, insidiously calculated, computational virus designed to infect and crash your operating system by forcing you to replay it over… and over… and over… and over… and over… and over…

NEFAS – OBLATION OV OBLITERATION

Some of you reading this may already be aware of NEFAS and, if so, it’s likely due to the band’s connection with long-time NCS faves Gigan (whose live guitarist, Rajan Davis, is the mastermind behind this particular project).

And while there’s definitely a few sonic similarities between the two groups (why else would Davis be the man for the job?) the tormented Tech-Grind psychosis of these three tracks definitely has a more raw and unrefined feel to it (one more reminiscent of classic Cephalic Carnage, in fact).

Opener “Xenomorphic”, for example, is just under four minutes of nasty, nerve-scraping guitar work and pulsing, pumping bass lines, propelled by a helter-skelter storm of neck-snapping snare beats and jerky, juddering kick drum patterns, climaxing in a queasy, gut-roiling crawl that’s seemingly designed solely to make you feel like you’re no longer standing on solid ground.

The subsequent shock and awe of “Spiral Degradation” is, if anything, even weirder and wilder, it’s high-velocity blast-work and contorted (yet disturbingly catchy) riffs – all topped off with a visceral array of ranting and raving vocal lunacy – constantly shifting shape and changing direction without warning, often seeming as though the entire track is about to fly apart at the seams yet somehow still held together by an almost Anata-like sense of murderous technical precision (up to and including its disturbingly atmospheric, dissonance-laced finale).

And then there’s “Mindstream Transference”, whose unnervingly groovy first half sound like Morbid Angel in the middle of a bad… and I do mean bad… trip, only to explode into the sort of violent, face-eating frenzy that suggests that whatever NEFAS were snorting while writing and recording this EP it was probably the cosmic equivalent of bath salts and so we might all want to steer clear of them until they come down.