Review Summary: Doubt what you have been told to believe.
Somewhere in the early aughts and amidst the New Jersey underground’s raging growl, Dripping’s terrifyingly bizarre debut
Disintegration of Thought Patterns came out in 2002 and clawed up the floorboards like an alien creature that never got the brutal death metal memo. With erratic song structures in malfunctioning time signatures, bulky slam riffs exploding out of nowhere, rap interjections and broken electronics, the album bypassed all known languages in favor of direct cortical transmission and, to this day, has absolutely no other recording or artist in the same astral bloodline. Then came the silence, and two decades passed like static. Until last year, when a brand new single emerged with almost no promotion, signaling the band’s rebirth and teasing a new EP, that has now been finalized as
Archaic Scriptures of Epistemology.
In its current form, Dripping features only one original member (the guitarist Sebastian Russo), yet the influx of new musicians, some of whom as old as the band’s debut, are well-versed into the trick and have a clear reverence for its unhinged origins. Ed Norris from the cybergrind project Vacant Moley has joined in, two members of Roots of Deception have taken over bass and drums, and Don Campan of Waking the Cadaver is now the main vocalist, which makes this a pretty striking line-up to (re)make the case for the band.
Archaic Scriptures of Epistemology remains uncooperative and idiosyncratic much like its distant antecedent, even though the once-in-a-lifetime cult anomaly that was
Disintegration of Thought Patterns is hard to replicate, and I don’t think Dripping were going merely for that either.
Two new tracks profess the band’s freakish character, channeling syncopated, convulsing riffs, bowel-rattling vocals and lurching grooves at stuttering rhythms and on top of sci-fi noise detritus. “Catastrophic Celestial Amputee” (also featuring Devin Swank of Sanguisugabogg) is clearly the highlight, due to the wonderful spacefaring ambient introduction with clean female singing just before the slam takes over and the composition runs amok. It’s also connected wonderfully through the outro of the previous piece “Echoes of Interdimensional Planetary Disturbance”, which opens the EP and delivers the initial throat-grab after the realization that you’re actually listening to new material from this band. While they don’t sound as exceptional or mind-blowing as they once did, the peculiarity doesn’t feel like a gimmick, and there’s nothing performative about their abstraction.
The reflective philosophical narrations scattered across these two tracks considerably elevate the listening experience and push for Dripping’s undeniably particular sound, but for me, that’s more or less the point where
Archaic Scriptures of Epistemology ends. What follows are two live recordings of songs from
Disintegration of Thought Patterns, “Passing Through the Spheres of Abstract Thought” with additional guest vocals from Diego Sanchez of Disgorge / Cephalotripsy fame, and “Reflecting Identities” having yet another feat by Clayton Meade (the current vocalist of Condemned), but let’s be honest, no one would blame you if you did not cry out for these kinds of re-recordings from a band after a 20-year hiatus. The EP closes with an alternate mix of “Catastrophic Celestial Amputee”, which also feels a touch redundant given how efficient the original version of the track is.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say this is a misstep for Dripping, but I might hesitate to actually call it a step - more like an expression of the band’s return to action and a cautious wait for what’s next. The discussion would be at a different level if instead of a mini-release with essentially less than six minutes of new music, we had one with at least 4-5 fresh tracks, let alone a full album, marked with the absurdity that defines them and is present in smaller doses on
Archaic Scriptures of Epistemology. Even so, Dripping still stands far apart from the average, streamlined incarnation of the genre, and for the few that are aware of this unique act’s existence, this news is only positive. As for the future and echoing Henry Rollins, “my optimism wears boots and is loud”.
