Horrifying samples, trudging through filth, and I keep turning up the volume. Let’s see, what is this song called – oh, “Trapped in Relentless Terror” – alright, well, that makes sense. You can practically hear Gollum skulking around in the cave, losing yourself in the first half of this crushing split from Ruin and Anthropic. “Starving Dementia” is just evil and it only gets better.
That first half was a satisfying surprise, as I was aiming to dive into the Anthropic tracks in part 2 after they blew us away in at the Hellbound 10-year anniversary party back in June. Several of our little cadre of contributors had no idea what was about to hit us when this quartet from Buffalo took the stage. I remember turning to Jonathan Smith and saying something along the lines of “this is like, death metal, but without any awkward transitions” – not the most in depth analysis, but I’m sticking to it. Old-school death metal that leans toward the grind side, that’s probably a bit more accurate.
Ripping through this split, which is short and anything but sweet, things turn nasty and fast by track 6 (“Victimized”) and by 8 (“(D)Evolution”) I was getting vibes of not just vicious, unpolished grind but also some of my favourite weirdo death metal, like the first few Hypocrisy albums from the early 90’s. Track 11 (“Trapped”) throws some mean breakdowns into the game, and 12 (“Disgrace of Humanity”) is the aural equivalent of a slap in the face. Yikes, not for the faint of heart! I mean, by track 13 you realize that you can’t take things too seriously when a band closes with a song called “Electrocuted Hamster” that’s 14 seconds long, but still. This leaves a mark.
Anthropic on bandcamp :
https://anthropic2.bandcamp.com/album/from-the-split-with-ruin
