[Archive Review] - Kurushimi, Return 3:Death EP (12.11.2022).
(Note: This review was originally posted on our old website, innerstrengthcheck.com. Due to the fine folks over at WordPress, that website is now toast. Henceforth, please refer to the current website for any new material! Links on socials and Youtube to be updated as I get to each one. Regards, - Brady)
Ah, Sydney. The capital city of my home-state and an archetypal tourist icon of our nation. A place comfortably smug in it’s tourist appeal, tainted by the daily foul slow-crawl that is the irritable commute through suburban arteries. An experience millions of city-dwelling Australians know and loathe all too well.
Marred by the progressive dearth of musical extremity, at the hands of neoliberalism, property development and noise complaints, and as Sydney’s venues progressively crumble under the wrecking-ball gentrification process, something stirs. Angrily.
The slashing of live venues, held ransom to Boomers and idiots who didn’t do 20 seconds of Google Maps-ing prior to moving in fucking right next-door to loud live music establishment, has enforced locals to get creative and collaborative.
You would be remiss to think that there isn’t something still stirring that is dark, brooding and caustic within this bowels of the endless suburban miasma. And boy howdy folks, does Kurushimi’s latest EP, Return 3:Death just absolutely burst from the boil of the local scene. A truly nasty shower of musical detritus, with thanks to and enthusiasm of the all-things-avant Art As Catharsis label, headed by Lachlan Dale.
Like hearing something musically extreme came from somewhere like say, the Goldy, managing to catch something truly corrosive from the same place that sports Bondi Vet unironically can be an exercise in cognitive dissonance even for those heavy-music-minded.
Welcome to the underbelly, kids.
Boasting a stellar lineup of the avant-garde underworld, the crew manifest of this listener-unfriendly vessel includes the eminency of Doug Moore’s (Pyrrhon) basement-chamber wails and shrieks, as well as appearances varying from that of prog-happy labelmate Simeon Bartholomew (SEIMS) to extreme metal reclusives Malikoth (Sanguine Tithe) and M. Refalæða (Ukryt, Verëvkina), skinsman Gene ‘Chewy’ White (Usta, Serious Beak), Matt Hollenburg (Cleric, John Zorn’s Simulacrum),and Marc Whitworth of Dillinger-Bungle-stepsons Five Star Prison Cell infamy.
The musical byproduct of such a subterranean orgy of members is as bleak, callous and wonderful as you’d expect. A musical dick-tease of all things bleak, this is a brief but powerful exercise in avant-garde edging.
And now, without further tangentiality, on to the tracks themselves.
Thirty seconds is about as long you get to spend in the dark-ambient unease that washes over the twenty-minute title track's introduction, before you're clapped upside the head with a very John Zorn-esque saxophonic blitz.
Tortured shrieks bleat helplessly, folding over cascades of deeper growls and bellows. The rumbling, rhythmic soothe of SunnO)))-styled droning chugs lulls an initial sense of confidence that 'oi yeahnahnahyeah', you know this template. Warbles of black metal tremolo and lead guitar twangs mix unhealthily with saxophone bristles and just.... linger. The bass lurks insidiously, never really puncturinf but always stirring. There’s no melodic recourse here; you’re just blue-balled by a serious of chordal embellishments and progressions that never reach resolution. It’s legitimately tiring, and intentionally so, but doesn’t suffer for it either.
16 minutes in, and the Captain’s Log reads how the addition of soloing does absolutely nothing to sate my appetite for some goddamn conclusion of all this. I catch myself wondering if it’s my neurodivergence, my absolutely-needed catharsis or some other personality quirk that leads me to enjoy this. As if exactly their intention, my frontal-lobe meandering is sharply cut to shreds by saxophone wailing. And then there’s - wait, drums?! Finally. Hang on, where’d the chords go? What happened to that screeching? As one anchoring element leaves, another appears. There’s a deft touch to this, an expertise in implying something but swapping cards from the deck as they’re played, in methodical order.
But then - a psychotic ramble of interspersed voices sees the drums pick up, clamouring and clashing and warbling in a stereophonic, hallucinatory experience. There is an expansiveness to Colin Marston‘s mastering (Krallice, Dysrhythmia, Gorguts) that actually makes this whole EP more jarring. Everything is given a chance to breathe, which makes it sound all the more sickly. And then, the title track is over.
Nary a chance for an exhalation, however, as you’re suddenly jolted. It’s veritably jarring, the transition to such an almost arena-rock-ready power chord and drum combo. By the time you’ve adapted to a strange new normal, this stable base is drawn and quartered into increasingly dissonant chords, arpeggios and a rhythmic backing that supports a steadily-climbing crescendo. After minutes on end of satisfyingly-murderous wails and growls building alongside a wall of increased tempo, spilling finally over into blastbeats, we’re given some sort of brief extreme-metal cogency, a wall of grindcore. Tipping off the latter end like anyone over 30 years of age standing up too fast, the dreary latter two minutes of the track vomit into an acid-washed sludge that almost deprives you of the musical climax.
And it’s done.
After twenty-five minutes, I’m left feeling drenched in the audiological body odour of a whole convention of musical thugs. I’m feeling suitably harrowed and jilted by the experience, and yet am absolutely craving more of this filth.
If this is a sign of things to come, I’m hoping the infection spreads further beneath sandy shores, and we can expect more pustules of grim goodness in the near future.
Return 3:Death released 11.11.22 on Art as Catharsis.
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