Review Summary: Your healer is now a bruiser.
What to say about Cleric's
Regression. To put it unprofessionally bluntly, I loved it. Listening to a lush amalgamation that is describable as
Between the Buried and Me gone bat
s nutso, it's a rush for sure.
Regressions is set up to be odd from the start. Every other track is an untitled ambient piece (complete with occasional tweeting birds) separating the multiple 10+ minute pseudo-progressive ambient doom-grind freakouts. Swift hardcore/grind soon plummets into subsonic doom bomb-drop riffs and back, all swathed in a thick ambient fuzz. The concoction is nicely topped with a veritable pantheon of shrieks, screams, yells, roars, and other such vocal throat-killers. The BTBAM reference above is due to the multitude of stylistic forays the band takes, journeying into Middle Eastern music, jazz, black metal, and of course straight up ambient, not unlike a much less sporadic BTBAM. Besides that, one could also come upon
Converge influences. There's some very Kurt Ballou-esque riffing involved here, and vocal similarities to Jacob Bannon are obvious.
In the above writing,
Regressions sounds a lot more neat and tidy than it actually, well, sounds. When you really piece all these upgrades onto the grindcore base, mathematically all you can get is a hulking mass chaos. But this is a bonus. The oddball, almost fly-by-night setup of
Regressions is executed so well as to be intriguing, rather than confusing or even unlistenable. Even the thick ambience never causes an overcast. There are several passages that come out really swinging, whirling bruiser riffs around like nunchuks. It'll get your pulse racing, and really, I'll take sucker-punch crazy
shit over any cookie-cutter
Napalm Death wannabes any day of the week.
Regressions even wraps up nicely for you. The final track, awesomely named "The Fiberglass Cheesecake", consists of only a few minutes of uninhibited RAAAAH!!! before cascading into the only gentle part of the album: an absolutely gorgeous 8-minute piano outro.
So I've established that this album is insane. I've also stated that I find it to be a rather impressive piece of work. However, it's whirlwind style is both an adrenaline rush...and goes all over the map. Call it "inconsistency" if you must, though that isn't quite the right word. With that
Regressions is simultaneously so close to a 5 and so far away. So I'll cut it even at a well-deserved 4.5.
