Cathexis – Untethered Abyss
Release Date: 25th June 2021
Label: Willowtip Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Modern Death Metal
FFO: Modern Death Metal, Gorguts, Artificial Brain.
Review By: Ben Harris-Hayes
OK, so anything we get from Willowtip Records is going to be of a certain style and more importantly, of a high calibre…and you know what you’re going to get. Hyper blasting drums, dizzying fretboard theatrics, sewer-dwelling vocals and bowel rumbling bass…right? Sounds fine to me!
Cathexis are a band of ‘carefully selected international talent’, according to the press release and they present their 3rd release in partnership with the aforementioned Willowtip.
I do love death metal for it’s silly song-titles…and this album kicks off with the metal-as-f**k title, ‘Horizonless Realm of Mechanical Retribution’. Stabbing you straight in your ears with something that Origin might have done a number of years back, there’s a nice (if that’s the right word?) use of awkward dissonance and it’s all neatly wrapped up in a wholly pop-song length of 3 minutes and 42 seconds.
I’ve seen the second track, ‘Given To The Colony’ lurking about various DM pages and YouTube channels, but it takes till track 3, ‘Harrowing Manifestation’, for a riff I can grin like a lunatic at. The verse (?) riff at 0:32 – 1:06 was banging and reminded me of the riff lord himself, Trey Azagthoth, at his chugging, groovy best.
‘Red Hook’ pick-scrapes and pinched harmonics itself into life (death?) on the 4th track from the album and is a bit of a chugging groover.
The pace is dropped for the longest track on the record, ‘Library of Babel’, which reminded me a bit of Morbid Angel again with it’s crawling chugging riffs and guitar/tom-tom accented moments.
Track 6, ‘Mortuss in Perpetumm’ (which translates as ‘He died forever’ I believe) brings out the blastbeats and palm-muted chugging thuggery (chuggery?) once more and has a sweet half-time breakdown near the start that really helps the song to flow.
Final track, ‘Reanimated Kin’ hits with an increased pace and buckets of tremolo picking, before slinking back into that mid-paced groove style that populates the ‘Untethered Abyss’ album as a whole.
All the songs on this record are relatively short for death metal standards, but it’s fine because they never outstay their welcome.
OK, so it’s another super technical death metal album…some will love it. Clearly, these guys can play. There’s no doubt of that. They crush it and getting noticed by Willowtip is no easy feat and a testament to their longevity and efforts. But once again, I am somewhat disappointed that all these bands, with all their immense talent and ability, cannot manage to create a hook or a riff that resembles something I want to hum in the shower, like the older days of death metal’s origins. It all seems like all these bands just want to ‘out-dissonance’ one another…and let’s face it, you’re simply not going to touch bands like Ulcerate and Portal, who sit upon their lofty thrones of dissonant horror-tinged metal. This is not the fault of Cathexis or the other bands akin to them, because they want to write that nasty style of dissonant death metal, but I find myself repeating the same comments about the lack of anything substantial to grab onto. The modern death metal fan will enjoy this I’m quite sure, so get your ears around it if the F.F.O tickles your fancy.
So, it’s onto the final numbers game…
The younger part of me that digs the grooving style that Cathexis deliver gives it a smooth 3/5.
The grumpy ol’ git who will continue to moan about a lack of hooks and memorable riffs in modern death metal gives it a 2/5.
So, we’ll meet in the middle with a…
(2.5 / 5)
