Dead and Dripping’s latest offering, Blackened Cerebral Rifts, is a testament to tight coordination and intricate polyrhythms; also a vivisection of organic ferocity using the previously mentioned tools. The rift between these two areas seems to be impossible to bridge. As I pondered this unfolding paradox, I began to wonder what group of insane savants were able to coordinate on this level. Then, truth is even more strange yet: this magnum odio springs from a single mind.
Blackened Cerebral Rifts doesn’t just sit comfortably in a single musical domain. It radiates the frenetic energy and putrid essence of grindcore, while decidedly being something closer to brutal/tech death – technically. This modern expression of extreme music defies genre and allows new depths of depravity to be reached.
The album’s length, admittedly daunting, serves a purpose. It’s a relentless sonic journey. Just when you feel grounded, it yanks the floor from beneath, only to offer a more coherent and cathartic experience towards the end. It’s not merely about saving the best for last. It’s about taking the listener on a holistic voyage, making the culmination all the more rewarding.
For those quick to label it as mere ‘brutal death,’ I urge a deeper dive. And while some may argue about the caricature nature of death metal, isn’t that part and parcel of the genre’s charm?
“Tragic Ascent of Absurdity’s Pale Moon” is the perfect introduction into the rift of cerebral riffs we are about to throw ourselves into. It immediately springs to half-life and shambles itself around a beat that is both clear and imposing, but also impossible to square your aural space around. The relentless snare keeps time, but it feels less mechanical and more organic – there are whiffs of gore grind amongst the brutal rot. This opener – like some kind of Frankenstein’s-lawn mower that spurts to life, choking on its own fluids – only to accelerate into a sickening tech-death filled outro after heating up.
These tracks all seem to pay homage to Cryptopsy (the band’s name is a call to one of their songs). I can hear the familiar array of elements, but it is slightly more methodical, while also slightly more emotionally unhinged. This is a tapestry of textures, tight and metallic – but organic. Wet and loose, but coherent. Distance, presence – I feel like I am being dragged around the room, rearranging the walls with my head along each new line of violent presentation. I can’t tell if this machine is motivated by hydraulic fluids or pure gore.
It takes until the middle of the record for the fits and spurts of this machine start to chug along as a coherent mass. The squareness of the beat that is underneath the layer of ichor starts to come through, but only in fleeting moments and only as a way to break your resolve. After the brutal and frenetic pace nucleates into doom, you realize that you are too deep in this hole to crawl out, the walls too slick.
“Hopeless Desire for Reprieve” is the most appropriately named item here – since the name Dead and Dripping. It is undeniably the most calm of the offerings, but it seethes with something that feels like gleeful malevolence. Like Evan Daniele is unzipping the imp mask to smile at your sorry state. There is an insanity that is palpable through the vibrato. This is a monkey’s paw wish, but you already cast your lot.
After the frenetic opener and false hope of an interlude, the tracks start to build the brutal and inevitable conclusion of this experience. The short breath of interlude only prepares you for further processing within this abattoir.
“Molecular Degradation Upon Warped Onyx Stoves” starts out with the echoes of the most bizarre version of Howlin Wolf’s spoonful – but by the time I have had that realization, the track has already ripped off my face again. It is amazing how readily my face can attach and detach by this point. I am starting to enjoy the punishment.
For my efforts, I am rewarded with these final two tracks – which somehow seem to build on the same incoherent vocabulary from earlier, but now the tongues being spoken begin to ring true to my ear. I am in the blackened and gurgling cult now. I am at peace by the end of the track as I prepare myself for my final butchery.
The closing track takes all that we have suffered, surmounted, delighted within, and extrudes it; molten and directly into your traumatized skull.
After stripping the malady down to its elements – it builds this mechanistic meat golem back up, chunk by dripping chunk; slowly culminating towards an ever distant fade off – making you bear witness to what you were just dragged through.
Dead, but vacillating and alive – dripping but mechanical – Dead and Dripping are my exact type of paradox – the most cerebral of palsies. Blackened Cerebral Rifts is not for the faint-hearted. It’s for the cerebral explorer, the extreme music aficionado who appreciates the balance between brutality and complexity. Dead and Dripping has carved out a unique sonic niche, one that beckons the listener to fall into its cerebral rift.