Wormed – Exodromos
Willowtip, 2013
Willowtip, 2013
Believe the hype. Wormed speak
adequately to the zeitgeist...or at least the online simulation of
the same. Problematics and possible arguments (not “controversies”)
when first considering a review of the new Wormed album: the role of
the writer and reviewer, the role of the listener. A reviewer is
expected to somehow, even in a limited space, for a short time, try
to convert music to words (depending on his/her skill, this is
another problem) and then comment on those same conversions – or on
the analogous conversions of others. I don't care about any of that.
Do you? If you want to listen to Wormed you have the means to do so.
Their new album leaked weeks ago, it's streaming on at least one
website, descriptions are unnecessary. It's death metal, it is (as I
said before in my review of the latest Devourment album) miscast,
misaligned, shallowly-understood slam rising newly to breach the
genre specifics of that hastily, dilettantishly
circumscribed neo-genre. We now see “mainstream” death metal,
meaning the “main current”, not death metal directed at
“mainstream” listeners (what the fuck are those?) squatting,
giving rise to daughter subgenres and then sucking up and
incorporating the ideas of the same. Babies making babies. This is
natural. Death metal, just like black metal, strains at the
boundaries of its definitions, as it always has, spins out mutations
and sucks them back in again. This is another way of saying: it's all
death metal. It's all metal. It's all rock and roll. Deal with it.
Wormed
enjoy playing with microgenre riff specifications. They'll throw out
something that hints at what might be a bedroom black metal nth
generation misunderstanding of an old Voivod riff if that makes you
feel comfortable in the newly spun, created-while-listening microcosm
of “interpretation” while you hunt for sonics that illustrate
fantasies of abduction you didn't know you had. You'll say: yes,
Voivod, yes, space, yes...something or other. Artificial harmonics,
off-key chromatic dithering that makes people say “dissonance”
without knowing what that word means in music theory. "Space" equals a limitless possibility that death metal can now move into,
its signifier: the discordant that screams “The Future” (always
capitalized), that Great Abstraction, that Great Nothing. Boundless
optimism meaning nothingness (and this is Wormed's secret alignment
with death metal's historic pessimism) because in pointing at all
possibility it points at nothing at all. Wormed's guitars careen, accelerate and stop mute, twist and
turn, writhe and dive, scream and microchug, absorb all of thrash,
the entire history of death, they rise to the melodic insincerity of
a failed black metal (yet never downcast, Wormed seek the
optimist...which means the inhuman) and then thumb their nose at the
same. Melodicism from the entire history of The Machine. If it seems insincere and outside all of history it's because
it seeks to be, in turn, outside all of humanity, forgetting that humans create
the robotic. At heart it's that same replicant rhythm, or the semaphore, dead-inside shouting to the deaf: the future is beat and pulse, it's sub-Meshuggah math rhythm
because this brings us, somehow, back to our humanity, although this
is just a surface communication and so: meaningless. Rhythm was the
beginning of music...will it be the future? Is that our essence? No,
now, humanity's fate seems to be in embracing technology, in
embracing The Inhuman, in absorbing and being fucked by “extremity” that is somehow
shoved by Freudian prosthetic god technology into a projected nirvana
that is, let's admit it...a totalitarian nightmare. Rhythm under
will, rhythm is the law. Wormed, on this album, play an incredibly
technically precise and beautiful form of death metal that should
inspire many (most to insincere, shallow replication) to follow in
their footsteps, it's entertaining, moving (in the bodily sense, it
doesn't touch the emotional), I have listened to this album at least
twenty times already. They completely lack spirit, transcendence,
humanity. That's the point. If that's truly (they're artists, you can turn away from what they're trying to sell you) the case this might be
the most negative death metal album in a long while. Death as in
“death of humanity?” It might seem natural to some, the
grave-worshippers, the ash-swallowers. I prefer my death metal a
little more humanistic. I want to feel runny flesh and grave fat in my
death metal, I want to feel horror, shame, guilt, dread...I want to
pretend I'm still alive. Wormed tells you: no, you're dead, you're abstracted consciousness, you're floating in the ether, let's
convert your bones to stainless steel and still make music. In that
sense? This album is a triumph. I love it in any case.
UA - 032313