Review Summary: BURP BURP BUUUUURRRRPPPP
Death metal has seen a huge resurgence in the 2020s so far. Not that the genre ever really fell off, but it seems like there are tons of new, great bands popping up all over the globe nowadays. Dead and Dripping is a one-man brutal/technical death metal, formed by multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Evan Daniele in New Jersey in 2016, and he has been releasing top-notch brutal death metal ever since.
Nefarious Scintillations is his fourth full-length album and it's his most disgusting effort to date.
The first track, ‘Nefariously Scintillating through Vacant Galactic Reservoirs’ is a nearly seven-minute long clinic on how to make dissonant riffage sound as filthy as humanly possible. The opening riff sounds like the band is opening a portal into The Upside-Down. There's a certain twang in the riffs that give off an avant-garde feeling while maintaining the pure carnage that you'd find on a bloody battlefield. The next track, ‘Horrifying Glimpses Into Inconceivably Demented Cityscapes’, is more of a straight-up brutal death metal banger with some killer, Immolation-esque pinch-harmonics and drumming that will cave your pathetic skull in. Evan is a master in creating a bog-like atmosphere while still experimenting with different riff styles and rhythmic drumming.
The next two tracks, ‘Pestilent Hints of Darkened Malodorous Vibrations’ and ‘Swollen Torsos Adorned with Pustulating Hexagonal Crania’, are both longer tracks, averaging nearly around 8 minutes a piece, and they really show Evan's ability to keep the listener engaged with longer tracks and some progressive tendencies all while keeping the brutality at a maximum. Brutal death metal bands have been making tracks longer and longer it seems like and I, for one, am here for all of it. The album continues with a combo of shorter and longer tracks and I really love the dynamic and direction that Evan took with his track lengths here.
I'd be remiss if I didn't highlight the absolutely nauseating vocal performance and I mean that in the best way possible. Evan has always had a knack for his Demilich-like, belching guttural vocals, but they're on a completely different level on
Nefarious Scintillations. The sheer force and strain that these corpse-like gurgles must put on his vocal chords is absolutely nuts, and while they’re not super decipherable (without lyrics), they add so heavily to the crypt-like atmosphere that they're almost like another instrument entirely.
Nefarious Scintillations has, in my humble opinion, cemented Dead and Dripping as one of the biggest forces in brutal death metal today, along with bands like Ecchymosis and Anal Stabwound for me personally. The consistency is there across four albums and I think that's a big enough sample size to say that Evan is one of the hardest hitters in the death metal scene today. While I would say that this is his second best album behind
Blackened Cerebral Rifts so far,
Nefarious Scintillations is definitely welcome in a discography full of filth and vile brutality.
