AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: TRIAGE — “DECIMAL POINTS”

(written by Islander)

I want to begin this premiere feature with a personal note. While working on Northwest Terror Fest in Seattle a few weeks ago I witnessed what might have been the wildest musical riot of the entire event, a performance at the packed-to-the-gills Barboza venue by the North Texas grind band Triage. They created an absolute cauldron of chaos that left us wondering if the moshers would require emergency care and the venue would need structural repairs afterward.

Vocalist Champ Morgan led the charge, striding into the mosh pit and going on top of the bar while howling like a madman. You can get a quick taste of what happened through this reel on Instagram. (You should also check out this video of the Triage set at this year’s Maryland Deathfest.)

But the personal note also involves my own interactions with some of the band members when they weren’t performing. By my lights, and the lights of everyone else working the fest who encountered them, they were some of the nicest people we met there, perhaps especially that wildman Champ Morgan, who watched Black Breath’s performance with me at stage-side. They even reacted with good humor to my shit-talking (as a die-hard Mariners fan) about the Texas Rangers — which I couldn’t resist after seeing a Rangers cap in the Triage crew.

And so, when I was given the opportunity to premiere a song from a new Triage record today, I jumped at it faster than a jackrabbit with its ass on fire.

I wasn’t familiar with Triage before they hit the radar screen of my friend Joseph Schafer, who’s the principal musical curator of NWTF. When I found out their lineup includes musicians whose backgrounds include such acts as Kill The Client, Gridlink, Cleric, PLF, and more, I got my hopes up. They rose even higher when I listened to the Triage self-titled debut album. But I still got blown away by their NWTF show.

Their new album is In The Trenches, and it’s set to be released on June 26th by Roman Numeral Records. A statement provided on behalf of the label tells it true: “[T]he aural violence so effortlessly turns into a damn-near physical one. There are no safe havens or moments of rest, only pure, unfiltered and unadulterated primitive aggression”.

Which, at long last, brings us to the song we’re now premiering from In The Trenches, a rager named “Decimal Points“.

If you’re an impatient bastard and jumped right ahead to the song stream, then you finished it in the time it would have taken to read all the foregoing verbiage — and maybe let it cut you up more than once if you’re a slow reader. For the more patient among you, what lies ahead is a ferociously frenzied but also frightening tirade, accompanied by an equally frenzied and frightening video created by Eeli Helin.

The song is exhilarating but also unsettling. The riffing is gritty, corrosive, and swarming, and it morphs in ways that (at least to this listener) channel sensations of cruelty, derangement, fury, pain, and desperation. Certainly, Champ Morgan’s raging vocals are borderline-insane in their intensity.

The song’s supercharged intensity also derives from lights-out drumwork and nimble bass-lines that are thankfully noticeable despite the ravishing nature of everything around them.

Given the brevity of that song, it’s only fair that we should drop a few hints about the rest of the album, which again appears to be inspired by the horrors of World War I: Every song on it, except for the opening and closing recordings, is a mosh-pit igniter. Most of the 16 tracks (barring those bookend recordings) are heavy enough and hot enough to tenderize and barbeque the burliest of bruisers and the wildest of elbow-throwers.

This doesn’t mean the songs are all the same, though all of them are short (those 16 tracks add up to 19 minutes of music). Triage do other things besides beat people and flame-broil them in fires of fury.

This is cross-spectrum music with nodes of punishing groove in the midst of run-riot speed and blistering violence, and Triage also constantly switch up both the techniques and the emotional quotient of the riffing in order to channel varying moods — though most of those moods are unnerving.

All the instrumental performers are impressively fleet of finger and limb, and surgically precise in their interactions despite how blown-out and maniacal the intensity often is. Speaking of intensity, listening to the thoroughly pissed-off vocals (which roar as well as gnash, scream, and fanatically cry out) feels like standing in front of a blast furnace with the door wide open.

To pick out a few even more specific hints: the lead-guitar in “Evolutionary Blindness” sounds so peculiar and demented as to verge on hallucinatory; the blazing “Anti-Regressionist” includes a white-hot guitar solo; you’ll probably want to yell the title of “Waiting Around to Fail” right along with the extravagant vocal expression of them; at times the riffing in “Pigs in Shit” miserably writhes (and things get very bleak elsewhere in the record too); and Triage slow the pace in “Holy Dollar” so you can bang your head silly.

There’s more, but we ought to stop now and simply say that by the end of the year In the Trenches will undoubtedly still stand as one of this year’s best grind albums.

TRIAGE are:
Drums: Bryan Fajardo
Vocals: Champ Morgan
Guitar: Chris Richardson
Bass: Travis Tompkins

To pre-order the record, visit the locations linked below.

PRE-ORDER:
https://www.romannumeralrecords.com/
https://romannumeralrecords.bandcamp.com/
https://triage666.bandcamp.com/album/triage

TRIAGE:
https://starlessabyssrecords.bandcamp.com/album/triage
https://rflrecords.bandcamp.com/album/triage
https://www.facebook.com/p/Triage-100038147931811/