Review Summary: The grindcore juice that’s worth the squeeze.
When Benjamin Franklin championed the first edition of the US constitution, he shrewdly pointed out that, unlike death and taxes, the veracity and durability of the law to produce any other law is a perennial cycle of review and improvement. Needless to mention, but both operations were Franklin’s second nature. Given that the newspaper he founded, published the first ever political cartoon in the Americas, chances are he would be enthralled by a sketch crafted by the ever prescient if secretive, Hellene satirical cartoonist Arkas. Therein, Charon contests Franklin’s quip relative to taxes, lamenting that they only get worse in real time, unlike his pre-eternal practice, which remains excruciatingly uneventful.
In principle, philosophical musing of the sort has ample potential for mass meme production, so it’s little wonder that Arkas has crafted a dedicated series, of cynical scope and indelible relevance, in which Charon goes down memory lane, recounting the perils of life as they intersect human stupidity, and the mundane nature of, well, being Charon. Characteristic of the overarching mentality, is an instance in which he discretely observes a couple of old timers at the gates of sexual intercourse, and pledges to postpone the inevitable for another five years, should they finish what they are about to start. Nominally, part of Arkas’ Charon work would be a good fit for the layout of
Inevitability, the latest Morgue Supplier album, but truth is it would be a poor depiction of the visceral sonic extremity, manifested in the third full-length effort of this Chicago IL grindcore act. In contrast, the brooding work of designer elect, the late Mariusz Lewandowski (RIP), which depicts the Reaper inspecting the fiery plains of his barren realm, is an excellent, if not the only befitting choice.
Morgue Supplier’s albums that precede
Inevitability, are all but footprints of quantum improvement and refinement, despite the fact that they were released in pretty much different epochs. The raw and chaotic nature of
Sociopath, the band’s Big Bang moment, has little in common with the infinitely more structured
Morgue Supplier, in which the level of brutality is intact, yet the song writing is refined and adorned with appreciable technical chops and sound work. Stylistically, the namesake album treads confidently on “traditional” grindcore/tech death metal, with pockets of sludgy groove and progressive abstractions, tiny, few and far between. The new album narrows in on the minority report of its predecessor, and elaborates on every core directive.
Progressively evident is the dilution of outright grindcore passages, even though their ferocity is blatantly amplified. The main culprit is the de facto implementation of a drum machine which is pounding at frequencies alien to the human capacity, and brings in mind Meshuggah’s Thomas Haake and his “drum machines
are the drums” quip. In an arrangement resembling the operation of revolving doors, the aforementioned contraption gives life to pseudo-random patterns of seemingly laid-back, doom-laden groove; if there’s something even remotely analogous for the sake of comparison, that would be Tony Wyioming’s drum work in Minsk’s
The Ritual Fires of Abandonment. The progressive alternation of grinding and sludge parts (for example, in the orgasmic “Closing In” or the maddening “Empty Vacant Shell”) is translated to the guitars that follow suit regarding surgical precision, and hypnotic/sickening/looped-ad-infinitum-ready soundscapes. Were it an instrumental album,
Inevitability would be just as important, but it would be a shame if Paul Gillis’ guttural vocals weren’t part of it, as they openly rival every summit of the kind – early ‘90s David Vincent, Jeff Walker, Aaron Stainthorpe (hold that name!) etc. - that has appeared during the last three decades.
The onslaught and the infinite replay value of the first three songs plus the dark ambient intermission that follows, feel like they bear the same weight as material in extreme metal classics such as
Covenant,
Necroticism..., these songs are simply
that engaging. A last but not least contributing factor that works in favor of the engagement trait, is the album’s sound work, a bleep of concerted/hi-end mastery, an oasis surrounded by a Sahara of compressed sound mediocrity, irrespective of metal genre. The remainder of
Inevitability falls behind only by a slight margin, but the more listens piled up, the stronger became the belief that the starting references of the album could go beyond the usual suspects. At some point, an innate desire to listen to ancient My Dying Bride (namely the EPs) emerged, not without good reason, as it turned out. Some of the very first few songs of the Yorkshire outfit share that back-and-forth between slower parts and grindcore, whereas Aaron Stainthorpe’s profoundly deep gutturals are a singularity not only from him, but for anyone who has ever tried to utter relevant vocals. Good art is always a reference to more good art, and
Inevitability definitely falls in that category. Given the periodicity of released albums so far, it is hard to tell what the future has in store for Morgue Supplier, but their third album is a career point, that every musical outfit strives to reach, at least once.
