Angry Metal Guy
If you’re squeamish…skip this paragraph. Or don’t, because any good fan of death and grind should be ok with a little gore. Vile Postmortem Irrumatio continues Monument of Misanthropy’s recent trend of writing albums centred around certain serial killers, following 2021’s eponymously-titled Unterweger (about Austrian-born killer Jack Unterweger). This time, the subject is Ed Kemper, whose crimes might have been indistinct from the many other misogynist multiple-murderers of the late sixties and early seventies were it not for his particular habit of decapitating his victims post-mortem, and…orally copulating with the heads. He did this not only with the six co-eds he killed, but also his own mother. If you didn’t know what irrumatio meant, now you do. Death metal is far from estranged from the violent and depraved, and Monument of Misanthropy again live up to their name and genre bracket with an example of one of history’s more violent and depraved men, and an excuse-for-misanthropy of a human being. How does the music fit its subject?
As album number three, Vile Postmortem Irrumatio cements the band’s sound as a lean, mean, deathgrind machine. As much a product of the stomping, crushing aggressiveness of the old style as the cutthroat, technical, mania of the new. Now leaning harder into the slick and twisted speed alongside sharp, scaling riffs, Monument of Misanthropy now sound a bit like if Cattle Decapitation had a baby with Aborted, minus the goblin cleans of the former and a large portion of the urgent melodies of the latter. Recognizable from previous efforts, the music is that much slicker, faster, and absolutely face-destroying. Speaking as someone who’s not typically this genre’s hugest fan, the album’s relentless pace, groove, and malice infectiously wormed their way into my brain, bringing a smile to my face, and an unstoppable repetitive bang to my head. Because, it’s clear, from the raison d’être of death metal as a whole to the specific instance of Vile Postmortem Irrumatio itself, that none of this is to be taken seriously, or as any glorification of Kemper. It’s morbid fascination, with a healthy sense of humor. And so the gleefully extreme guitar-wrangling and clustering drum-battering are simply thrilling, and the interview samples that divide the record have that perfect horror-movie chill, enhanced by the building of creepy synth-accented accompaniment.
Vile Postmortem Irrumatio by MONUMENT OF MISANTHROPY
Vile Postmortem Irrumatio works because it’s a lot of things masquerading as only one thing. You think you’re getting a slab of dumb, silly-heavy fun (and you are), but crammed into that hulking, brutal body is much more. There’s unexpectedly aesthetic minor melodies soloing and swooping over the gory blastbeats and bass churning (“Manipulating the Experts”, title track, “A Nice Beheading for MoM”). There’s groove aplenty (“The Atascasdero Years,” “The Devil’s Slide,” “A Nice Beheading…”). There are vibrant flashes of electrifying tremolos and lurching disso-death shivers irreverently joining forces (“Hits One and Two,” “The Devil’s Slide,” “Your Treachery Will Die with You”). There’s a satisfying range of vocal styles, from guttural gurgles to squealing screams. What might sound like a set of Barnum statements for modern brutal death metal, really only applies to the top-shelf stuff, the stuff that gets people like myself, who struggle with the death metal pedigree, on board. Riffs, vocal delivery, and the crucial percussive factor are punchy as fuck, rhythmically smacking you about the head to a series of slamming (“Pueblo Paranoia”), bouncing (“A Nice Beheading….”), buzzing (“The Atascasdero Years”), stomping (title track) swings. This hits hard in the most enjoyable way.
You would think that inserting multiple instrumental, interview-sample-bedecked interludes would cause issues for flow. Ok, it does, a tiny bit, but really not very much, and in this regard Monument of Misanthropy have come leaps and bounds beyond Unterweger, where the spoken-word sections did jam up the gears a bit. “Why Did You Keep the Heads” comes the closest to compromising the album’s momentum, but it still falls naturally within the structure of the record’s story, its concept. Opener “First Time It Makes You Sick To Your Stomach” and later “Oh, I Suppose You’re Gonna Want To Sit Up And Talk All Night Now” are unironically creepy in the aforementioned horror-movie way, and amp up the suspense quite brilliantly before their respective following tracks come tearing in. This, in combination with the sheer ease with which the music pulls off its tricks, make its jams pretty memorable. And we haven’t even got to the obvious implications for lifting abilities with literally any of the (non-interlude) cuts blaring in your ears.
There remains a question of the true longevity of Vile Postmortem Irrumatio, but a considerable part can be attributed to a snobbishness towards the genre. It’s loud, and it’s certainly not pretty—proclaiming a DR that isn’t 3 only because of it’s very dynamic interludes—but it is a slick, nasty, solid bit of fun. And from a brutal death metal album about a necrophilic serial killer, what more could you possibly ask?
Rating: Very Good
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Transcending Obscurity
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: August 9th, 2024
The post Monument of Misanthropy – Vile Postmortem Irrumatio Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.
Mon Aug 12 16:20:24 GMT 2024