Brutalities of Modern Domination

The silly name (Gorezone sounds like a bad Robert Englund film) led me to expect a little less from this album than I got. They’re a German band, but very open about their American influences, this being brutal, and I mean brutal, death metal, largely in the illustrious tradition running from Cannibal Corpse through to Suffocation. It aims for that relentless, pummelling groove of the former as well as the tendency towards mangled, regurgitated, ever shifting riffery of the latter. But Christ, the level of intensity that this sustains is impressive.

This is in no small part due to the percussion (by Asgard Niels, who had a brief stint in Holy Moses), which is fantastic. Take Control Us; the blasting is of Flo Mournier levels of adrenaline-rush clattering, and the fills seem determined to put a steel-capped boot through the rest of the band. It sounds like he’s trying to overwhelm his guitar players, and the effect is immense. It is this that gives this music an edge over their innumerable contemporaries, because the drumming gives the whole record the cybernetic sheen of mechanized violence. In fact, it makes it really justify that cover art.

Combined with the riffing, this is something truly horrific. We switch here with the upmost fluency from punching groove to grindcore-inspired avant-metal, where the riffs become so scraping and contorted that you could almost be listening to Portal. It makes a potential fatiguing track like Driven by Cells of Bigotry seem well paced and varied, as it collides from dunderheaded guitar stamping to grinding noise like a car in a Demolition Derby.

Surprises are hardly the point but they aren’t entirely absent. 42,7 is tasked here with bringing something slightly different to the party. It’s ominously minimalist riff clunks up and down, while industrial noise and a creepy array of inventive sound effects swirl over the top, giving it at some points the feel of a Red Harvest industrial thugfest and at others the arcane outlandishness of Nile. Progress further, and truly unsavoury guitar solos claw frantically to the surface to breathe, before being kicked back down in horror by the rhythm section. Interestingly, it ends with a JFK quote- This is a band only half-wedded to its brutal subject matter; at other times keen to demonstrate its ill-fitting hippy credentials (see also The Waterboarding Complex).

It has been a while since I really got drawn into something of this ilk. Brutalities of Modern Domination has the same spirit that I find electrifying in bands like Azarath- seeming in a very different realm of death metal, but both bands revel in the abrasive chaos they can cause. This is well recommended for the unafraid.