Exclusive Track Premiere: Pissrot’s “Spectral Mass”
Heavy, bloated, filthy ghosts.
Permit me a disemboweled straw man: there is a predominating sense that death metal bands channeling any of the various heydays of the multifarious genre either succeed in reinventing the wheel for modern audiences or fail in wearing aforesaid wheel like a dragging millstone around their necks. I am not even particularly interested in conversations that attempt to parse who channels properly or improperly the Once and Still Greats, but it’s an unavoidable paradigm. Fortunately, some bands such as Tennessee’s Pissrot are so deeply uninterested in such valuations that you can chuck the proverbial wheel, baby, and bathwater all at once. It’s no matter whether wheels are being reinvented or not; instead, Pissrot is so far from building wheels or worshiping obelisks that we can just enjoy the visceral soup of their prehuman brand of death metal in an uncomplicated fashion. If it’s all piss, vile, and gunk anyways, then why bother with anything else?
On April 17, the Kingsport trio will release Absolute Form via Iron Fortress Records, a record with a “very intense and bleak” atmosphere that uses “elements of noise and bestial black metal” to bolster the band’s affinity and commitment to their “death metal roots.” If the lyrical content of Absolute Form stretches towards the “cosmic or spiritual in an out-of-body way,” seeking such “broad landscape and concepts like perception and ungodliness,” the rotten, subterranean sounds of the band will keep you fearfully shackled and inescapably strapped in your stupid decaying meat carcass in ways all the more mortifying.
Lead single and opening track “Sunless Embodiment of Repugnance” is a bleak and blackened descent into the cavernous realms of the (un)conscious. The hammering snare is full of disregard for the fleshy impermanence of existence, while the crawling doom of the song’s heaviest motif is graveyard-bound and stinks of decomposition. Much of the album, including “Lifeless Subterranean Frontier, “Absolute Form,” and closer “Chasm II,” abuses this formula with fetid glee and fomenting delight. What will impresses listeners is how sharp and clear everything sounds while no doubt being recorded in a kind of burping pit of bonemeal and barely organic effluvia.
Today, we’re thrilled to premiere for you the album’s second single “Spectral Mass.” About the track, guitarist/vocalist Arian Mauk has this to say:
Spectral Mass’ covers a broad spectrum of sounds under the umbrella of Death Metal. From pitch shifted vocals to slams reminiscent of Suffocation. This is actually the only track on the album that has any sort of slam or breakdown. Lyrically this track follows an unholy amalgamation of limbs, skin, shit, fat, and plasma as it rises from the grave up through the ground. Overall a great track to get you ready before hearing this whole album.
Body parts, organs, and excrement in all their abject forms. You almost wish the slamming breakdowns of “Spectral Mass” would stick around a bit longer as Pissrot has a serious knack for playing in that putrefying sandbox. Too bad. You’ll just have to whet your withered and decaying beak on the slams contained therein before flinging your shabbily adorned body into the otherwise abhorrent chasm that is Absolute Form. Enjoy.
Absolute Form arrives via Iron Fortress on April 17.
Vinyl, CD, and MC formats will be available.
