ENGULF

Death metal fans are spoilt for choice these days. If you like to keep it filthy and old school, there are countless new bands decimating the target, and most of the old bands are still out there terrorizing the world too. If you prefer your death metal to sound vicious, technical and modern, there are vast hordes of suitable candidates to keep your caveman urges sated. And somewhere to the left of both, another nebulous group of bands continue the grand death metal tradition of ignoring the rules altogether and doing something weird or surreal with the genre instead.

Meanwhile, there are also confounding entities like ENGULF. A one-man band from New Jersey, multi-instrumentalist Hal Microutsicos' project is absolutely pure in conception and execution, but mischievously defies easy categorization. With one foot in old-school grime, another in tumultuous tech-death, and a third, vestigial stump in woozy, psychedelic chaos, ENGULF are anything but generic. Meanwhile, all of these things occur simultaneously, which ensures that "The Dying Planet Weeps" is a debut that stands out on originality alone.

Joyously, the songwriting matches the startling quality of the music's skewed hybrid. "The Nefarious Hive" is a fine example of how ENGULF harness death metal's more accessible inclinations while still making deeply dark and twisted music. Evolving from a rugged, mid-paced assault to waves of nauseating dissonance, it is a blizzard of strange and daring ideas. Likewise, "Ominous Grandeur" begins in majestic tech-death mode, before slipping down a sludgy side street, pissing vitriol from every pore. Changing gears at will, ENGULF delight in the juxtaposition of churning, hellish noise and sharply defined, classic DM tropes. Both "Withered Suns Collapse" and "Lunar Scourge" boast flashes of melody, albeit threaded through a shower of venomous, machine-gun scree and a gruesome, avalanche of discordant doom respectively, and "Bellows From The Aether" is weird and brutal enough to cause nightmares but, despite it all, catchy and memorable too. Even something as pointedly warped and wayward as "Plagued Oblivion" features a few ragged but riveting old-school riffs, with the ghost of Chuck Schuldiner audibly in possession of Microutsicos' bilious bark.

Nonetheless, this is a truly distinctive piece of work, and a deeply weird one too. Late track "Earthbore" is a wonderful blur of disparate, death metal strains, with its heart firmly in the rambling dissonance camp, but with a momentum and momentousness that are resolutely old school. Blastbeats erupt from all corners, unsettling riffs overlap and start to eat themselves, and ENGULF seem to blossom and mutate in real time, alive with death metal's freakier possibilities. The dourly serene, instrumental title track provides a welcome moment of reflective respite at the bitter end, but it is one man's stubborn refusal to conform that marks "The Dying Planet Weeps" out as a potential future classic.