Salutations, portal loiterers! It’s been quite the year for outlandish death metal albums thus far. In February, Ad Nauseam dropped their cerebrum-liquefying sophomore LP, Imperative Imperceptible Impulse, just days after the release of StarGazer’s fourth dimension-warping album, Psychic Secretions. Famine, Putrid and Fucking Endless, the debut full-length from progressive death metallers Atvm, revels in invigorating melodies spliced with stupefying riptides of corrosive tempo shifts (podcast review coming in a couple of weeks). And more recently emerged the torturous hallucinations from Qrixkuor’s Poison Palinopsia. This is but a mere smattering of records that have piqued my curiosities and have held my attention long after experiencing them. None so far though have been as eccentric as Diskord’s Degenerations.
Diskord is an Oslo-based death metal trio that has existed since 1999. In their approximate twenty-two years of respiring they have released several demos, a couple of EPs, and three albums. Although I have been aware of the band’s existence for a handful of years now, I admittedly am not well-seasoned in their discography. So, I thought who better to drag along through this corpse parade of rambles than one of our very own writers, Tim Harbour?
It took at least half a dozen spins of Degenerations for my gourd to begin computing the pandemonium. The slurry of dissonant riffs and ever-tilting drum patterns, fills, and blasts locked me in a state of disorientation. In a way, the album’s tenacious flux of barbarous timbres felt rather numbing at first; however, the longer I loitered to soak in the slithering bass lines and peculiar atmospheric sprawls, Diskord’s eccentricities became more digestible. The cowbell strikes that originally left me scratching my skull wound up peppering their compositions with some whimsical levity. Moreover, the discharges of bedlam slowly congealed into misshapen grooves with each passing spin of the record.
Despite all the talk of being flummoxed by Degenerations, Tim and I found ourselves enraptured by its quirkiness. Diskord’s tendency to lambaste with a vortex of merciless frequencies only to devolve into a primordial chug section is amusing. The odd minute-and-a-half breather “Lone Survivor” is a skin-crawling spacewalk through doom-enameled incisors. And within the far-flung reaches of the album’s last track, “Beyond the Grime”, oblong neoclassical-like textures fuse with phaser-caked distortions.
In this episode, we endeavor to dissect the enigma that is Diskord. Though we could offer up essentially no comparisons between Degenerations and their prior LPs, it was an immense delight trying to make sense of their lunacy. Thank you all so much for tuning in!
