Goldicot Culls The Week - VII

by Goldicot

Mon, 24 Feb 2025

Read in 3 minutes

Some find heaven in sevens and elevens

weekly

In keeping with the albums themselves, I’ll keep it brief this week. Listen to music. It’s your job to enjoy it, not music’s job to entertain you. Art is the end result. The question of what is the interesting part. It is better to give than to receive. Insight comes from within, not from without. You can do better.

One of the main motivating factors for these weekly articles was a way to honor the prolific artists who release multiple quality works in a single calendar year. There’s a sense that these artists are releasing as they are writing, and if you listen with them, you can learn, in real time, as they do, in a mutual act of revisitation and education. Tonight I am honored to present, surviving the cull for the second time, Spume, and their absurdly forceful brand of goreslam. In Cull III, I waxed philosophical about the skill it takes to hit so hard, and on Orgy of Corpses, Spume does the same. A bit slower, a tad more deliberate, they’ve traded in the explosions for a dragging, face down across the ground, head spiking off the rocky terrain, in a grisly mimicry of headbanging to the groove. The result is not as alien as Xenomold Geomorphologies, but the newfound familiarity is almost more disturbing, and either one is surprisingly insightful for such a genre as goreslam.

Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill. There are no reinventions or absurdities here, no vanguards plunging into no undiscovered territories, there is merely some damn fine musical storytelling performance. Reeking Aura has just enough of that intangible meaningfulness, when music feels like a memory from a place and time you’ve never been, to fill a 10-minute trifle with buildups and payoffs aplenty. The secret sauce appears to be an otherworldly two-minute synth interlude, possibly played by Colin Marston, and this twenty percent diversion lets the two death metal rippers breathe in, full and deep. Speaking of full and deep, Will Smith is on vocals. That is all.

Slippery when wet, Vengeance Evangel is drenched in blood, oozing and gushing in equal measure down and away from grasp or reason. This is not a metaphor – Chaos Inception plays sickly slick licks of vicious viscosity, visceral and palpable thanks to beautiful production rendering every grisly gory detail with ugly gloss and glittering putridity. All fat has been stripped away, leaving only pure muscle and brutal bone exposed, an anatomical masterpiece of push and pull, jointing crushing heavy weights and frenzied motoric pumping in incomprehensible fleshwrought parallel. Good for repeated flayings.