Archive Review: LIFE/LIMB - Emergent LP (07.12.2022).
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Anyone who knows me, knows I'm a lover of emergent gameplay, both in video games and tabletop format. The recent success of titles such as Dwarf Fortress, No Man's Sky and Rimworld all attest to this being a fairly common thread amongst gamers, these past few years especially.
Why? Well, plenty of factors abound, but my hot take is that our brains are wired for sense-making. Specifically, our animalistic hindbrain and organisation-seeking frontal lobe alike, yearn for a sense of mastery and autonomy that comes from deriving meaning out of horrendously random, chaotic and unforgiving series of events.
Either way, we love making ourselves a good pareidolia-style impression, to existentially derive something from a world that increasingly feels both more complicated and more RNG-driven over time.
Hence, the appeal of, purpose and likely inspiration behind albums such as this. Dissonance is on the rise.
In a world exponentially more nonsensical, competitive and in need of catharsis by the day, it's no surprise the extreme metal scene is just growing more teeth, more tumours and more mutations. And, boy howdy, is Emergent an LP that bursts forth like a freak accident of our own irradiated sociology.
Deliberately witthholding in some means, the band's bandcamp bio delivers some telegraphing in terms of their standpoint, what with AJT (percussion) and JAW (voice, 'dyschords') choosing to take a clear stance on respecting the First Nations sovereignty of the Whadjuk Noongar country upon which this release was recorded. As well, the track 'Revenant' is codified as tribute to individuals Kenneth Williams, Gary Hammond and Joseph Wilson.
A deliberately-cryptic biographic line beautifully summarises the intent:
'A condemnation of mortal parasitic behaviour delivered through atonal dissonance, rhythmic punishment and apoplectic dysgraphia.'
Normies turn back. You were warned.
No? Okay, too late.
Opener 'Revenant' gives barely a moment's bated breath, a warbling intro containing a single angular arpeggio, before double-kicks launch us into the fray. Reminiscent of PORTAL, there's a constant, sickening stop/start death metal-ish lurch, reverb-heavy screams and roars over a crashing sea of rhythm and chords.
It's hard to pick out the clarity of the tremolo underneath, but that just makes the intended unease even more pronounced.
Higher pitched shrieks pierce above the din, falling rapidly.
What the - nope, no time.
'Internecine' just kicked the door off its' hinges. Handfuls of harsh, spiky chords and angular arpeggios are pelted at us, fumbling over a rollicking tempo that edges both breakdowns and blasts, but never keeps either for long. Vocals oscillate between the distal din of some cosmological horror, parsecs away, and a shrieking imp mere centimeters from the ear canal. Increasingly pained screams really get under the skin, but it's all over within a couple of minutes.
No chance for reprieve just yet, however. Teratoma (which embodies the spirit of the album just as much as its' namesake) plays with the push-pull dynamic even further.
The rhythmic pulse presents as being more directive now; the album's narrator barking and shrieking in controlled bouts that feel almost like a spring-loaded lever, directing the tension between blasts and chugs.
During the faster sections, some more discernment in the production would be useful to further elucidate the technicality behind the savagery, and I'm left feeling slightly wanting to have more of that snare bashing my shit to pieces in the mix. But I feel the production is a deliberate effort and thus enjoy the fact that two musicians have made about five worth of noise, here.
'Perversion' continues the trend of wet-but-buzzing distortion, sounding less like a singular band and more like twenty Transformers made of HM-2 pedals in a knife fight with the drums section of your local music shop. There's somehow some groove amongst all of it, kind of like early Entombed made a grab at the mic stand. But familiarity and repose-via-groove are fleeting.
As your A1 and A2 auditory cortices trade desperate notes, funnelling as much down the line to the hindbrain as they do up to management, there's an internal sigh of relief as something approaching a stereotype, an image, a schema.
'Ephemeral' clunks forward with a plodding intro, deliberately swaggering and giving off the pretence of one of Converge's latter-day slow-burners. Coral Blue, is that you? Jane Doe? Maybe!
That is, until a semi-atonal, slide-heavy riff slaps you upside the head for a bit, rustling your head afterwards with a breakdown so jagged you'd swear some bogan just tried glassing you with it outside a club in Surfers. Your neurons shatter again, bathed in the meth-monkey frenzy being piped into your fragile little head.
'Apertures' doesn't let you collect any sense of proprioception afterwards either, kicking you straight upside the head with a mash of soaring growls and once-again Kurt Ballou-friendly tapping. Things launch into an even more miasmatic state from here though. A complete wall of chaos that abates only just towards the end, for a more purposeful (if disorienting) breakdown. This is the part in the narrative-gameplay loop that is often most likely to see rage-quits, save-scums and re-rolls. It's just pure, unadulterated and unhinged.
'Right', you think to yourself, steadying your repose for the next battering. So far, you've had less than two minutes per track to make sense of this cathartic din.
With a shit-eating grin, you compose yourself and stand defiant for 'Neurotoxin' - only for that tricky little bugger to run off in the complete opposite direction. 'Well, farrrk me'.
A warbling, pained intro that festers in feedback and distortion, this one finally provides the death-doom payoff you've been waiting for. Something to anchor yourself upon, the spindly but consistent enough riffing flits with harmonics and slides above a rhythm section that provides a welcome semi-regular battering. This is getting into Stockholm Syndrome territory (the aphorism; band is actually an apt comparison too though!), as any deviations from this sludge-ridden plodding feel like an all-new assault on the senses.
We should, by rights, by expecting such a blast-heavy midsection, for instance, and it feels both equally right and wrong that we're provided it. The track totters off in doom filth just as expected, but I can't help but feel albums like this are their own thing, no matter what schema my mathcore-loving brain try haphazardly to apply to it.
Perhaps that's the point. After all, cognitive deficits such as dysgraphia are often painfully evident to the sufferer, their physical manifestation wilfully ignorant of the sufferer's conscious effort to apply as the 'right' thing. The victim knows the words and is clearly intending to express them, but there's a discord in between that results in a divergent end-product.
I feel similarly about closer 'Breach', the last syllabus item in an album-long lesson in how to rattle, tease and deliver. Sure, plenty of frenetic fury, blasting and tempo changes are here, much as expected.
But, especially on this track, there's a sense of an unknowable, cosmic-sized force just absolutely rushing you from the shadows. A thrash metal palm-mute gallop here, a discordant tremolo there, an assortment of fills, barks and pained cries - and then feedback. And... wait, what?! It's done?!
I mean, I feel a tad lighter, but.... aww.
Touche, LIFE/LIMB. Touche.
I feel dirty and harrowed by this experience, and in the day and age where everyone with a fretted instrument seems to be gunning for the title of the next Gorguts, PORTAL or Dillinger, often it's hidden local gems like this that show us just how truly gruesome dissonant heavy music can get.