Review Summary: Better than the eatmyshortsingest thing from The End
Regressions is far and away the ***mypantsingest thing I’ve ever heard from Trey Spruance’s Web of Mimicry label. The drum blasts, cursed zombie screams, and sheer guitar crushery have often been elements, but never trademarks, of the label’s most notable releases. While Cleric are surely willing to bamboozle you with instrumental and electronic embellishment, they’d much rather split your spine and eat your brains.
Cleric employ a panoramic style of grinding death that once in a while makes room for a gruesome sound effect or nervous jazzy detour. While the record’s structure (mostly ten-plus minute tracks separated by sub-three-minute mood enhancers) might indicate doom leanings, instead Cleric have conjured hurricane-level assaults that maintain redline ferocity throughout their runtimes. When the pace does slow, distorted screeches and cymbals pour over the stretched chords like latrine-mud syrup over thick, rotting pancakes.
Regressions is best taken in one fetid slab, though individual tracks certainly have their charms. “A Rush of Blood” flashes its horror metal creds before being bent into Trevor Dunn-like shapes, while late track “Poisonberry Pie” waxes BTBAM with a jaunty piano line and clean vocals. The fourth track suggests a rural American road hunted by the world’s last and hungriest Tyrannosaurus, and the ninth takes only thirty seconds to lay out the most basic agenda in extreme music: the primal scream. “The Fiberglass Cheesecake” drops a hyperdense, Locust-esque pummeling before spinning out the record’s final minutes in concert piano melancholia cut with washes of static and mild percussion.
Cleric have created exhausting and exhilarating music, but is it for you? If you ever imagined Pig Destroyer packing up and heading west to crash an Estradasphere show, with a stop in the Rockies to pick up the Cephalic Carnage guys (in one of their greener moods), then you’re in serious need of a hobby. A hobby like listening to Regressions.
