One lazy afternoon I found myself in the digital company of one Lille Gruber, drummer of German brutal death metal titans Defeated Sanity, and the topic of discussion was “balls”.  Traditionally, brutal death metal has been the zenith and the bleeding edge of testosterone-soaked music, and with limp releases such as Origin‘s newest release stepping into the limelight, the two of us were left to ponder: “what happened to the BALLS in death metal?”  Bands like Necrophagist and Origin strive for inorganic perfection – productions as clean and sterile as your local E.R., played with metronomic, robotic precision.  Think of it as a product of the “Guitar Pro” generation, and a reflection of the superficial values of western society.  We do, after all, live in a country of airbrushed cover girls and Botulism For Your Face (TM).  What happened to the cornerstone of death metal music?  Its original goal was to hit a nerve in the listener… to tap into that primitive, reptilian part of the brain and stimulate our natural instinct to kill.  This is the cause of the rush that you feel when you listen to really, really fucking heavy music: the adrenaline of the kill.  This is what you feel when you listen to classic albums such as Pierced From Within, Considered Dead, and Mental Funeral.  This is the sensation that you will experience for thirty one minutes and forty two seconds when you insert Disgorge‘s album Consume The Forsaken and press play.

All of the technicality and breakneck speed is here on display, the tempo is relentless and rarely does the assault ever let up.  The riffing is absolutely livid, some of the sounds that guitarist Diego Sanchez conjures from his instrument are almost otherworldly in their hellish ferocity.  The gnarled, dexterous bass playing on display from the late Ben Marlin is absolutely iconic (as long as you’re wearing headphones) and really set the bar high for all brutal bass performances.  However, whereas the aforementioned bands are lifeless and robotic, Disgorge is a different throbbing, heaving beast altogether, bringing to mind images of a bio-mechanical, organic Hell in which the listener is imprisoned in for the duration of the album.  The lack of a click track leads to some of the most dynamic moments in death metal’s history, riffs that absolutely defy traditional transcription, much in the same sense as Gorguts‘ classic work Obscura.  Classical music terms come to mind: con fuoco, furioso, rubato, allargando, stringendo… there are ample examples of all of these in the songs of Consume The Forsaken.  However, these are not products of classical training or music school studies, but products of being a band that works as one unit, that breathes together and carries a legendary pedigree in live performance.  Creating a recording an album of this breadth and level of expression would have been impossible had the members been scattered all over the country, much as the new Origin record was constructed.  You’re not hearing five musicians, you’re hearing a single, linked organism.   There are simply varieties of musical information that can only be heard, not written down on paper, and in these unspoken criteria, Disgorge is king; the atmosphere of the music is absolutely oppressive, the vocals are unrivaled in the genre for their sheer power and intensity.  There are no inhaled gurgles here, only the gut-wrenching delivery of AJ Magana, who we now have the pleasure of hearing live with Defeated Sanity as well as on their upcoming full length.   Even the drumming (while somewhat unremarkable now with the advent of guys like Lille rewriting the proverbial book on brutal drumming) is so intrinsically tied into the music and Disgorge’s identity as a band that it’s indispensable to their live, ‘raw’ sound.  The crash cymbals fading into each crushing repetition of the eponymous title track’s signature breakdown will have you pumping your fist either into the air or through a wall; the feel and sensibilities carried over from Ricky Meyers‘ now seventeen year career with the band.

Few times have I ever been privy to such a personal, unified effort to create music that is utterly violent, and though more technical bands will come and go, and other brutal acts will continue to mimic and attempt to improve upon the original formula… Consume The Forsaken will forever have the biggest, hairiest balls of them all.  Hyper-masculine brutal death metal at its most advanced and at its most primitive, simultaneously.  Even the semi-literate lyrics don’t detract from the record’s classic appeal.  A great album to blast loudly while drinking, and a perfect album to roast one to and study intently with headphones, losing yourself in the details and the alternate universe of pain and suffering that Disgorge have created.  Only time will tell if the album’s status as the perfect brutal death metal record will be dethroned by the the Germans’ upcoming Chapters Of Repugnance, much the same as Consume The Forsaken dethroned (arguably) Pierced From Within before it.  Regardless of your opinion, respect must be given to these California stoners who took it upon themselves to attempt to elevate the genre to the next plateau of aggression and malice.  URGHHHHHHHHHHH!!