Written by Carcassbomb
- Horrisonous
- A Culinary Cacophony
- Death/Doom
- Sydney, Australia
- 2019
- 9/10
Bandcamp – Memento Mori (label)
This is how I like my death metal, with a healthy dose of Aussie doom. It’s becoming that kind of place, the kind of country that needs doom to seep through the cracks in the bleach white wall of the Starbucks joined to an Apple store. There’s plenty of pent up rage on this island just waiting for the chance to crush the ‘surface’. This is raw, heavy and real. This is probably one of the filthiest death releases this year. For fans of death like The Chasm and Autopsy and death doom like Swallow The Sun. The balance is really good here, leaning into death heavily.
The artwork is by Rod Scott – Instagram – an Australian artist who also does tattoo work. Definitely did well with this piece, I can’t imagine any other cover after listening to this. It’s a great level of presentation for a debut LP. The art is exactly what the album is, a horrendous cosmic entity delicately picking away at the little parts of your brain. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it tickles.
A Culinary Cacophony offers such a diverse range of sounds through the prism of utter sludgy chaos. It’s brutal with complexity and doom resembling melody but ultimately never softening. Vocally they bring a blackened element to it with some of the most intense throat action around and the right recording. There’s a balance throughout where you can see all of the different influences from old to modern but Horrisonous have managed to assemble them into their own sound, not just copying them. It’s a much slower death than we get in Australia, with our fondness for grindcore and deathcore.
The old school elements are apparent but not derivative, there’s a modern sensibility to the song structures that come naturally from playing within a modern music scene. If this were an old death metal record from the 90’s out of distribution I would believe you and tell you to put out a remaster right now, I’d tell you it’s ahead of it’s time. Well I think 2019 is right on time for this band.
Perpetual Mincing is a standout track for me, it has such great transitions between death and raw black, then it culminates in this sludgy jig that unexpectedly wavers off into a melodic proggy doom riff. You just don’t know what you’re going to get with each track, it feels exciting and interesting. I dare any death or black fan to put this one on and try to turn it off. It’s consistently progressing like some titan slug leaving waste in it’s path. The sound pulls you into it’s world.
Looking forward to seeing them live sometime in Brisbane!
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