Some promo and/or blurbs are overwritten and filled to the brim with absurdly heightened praise, setting you up for an expectation that most albums could never keep (Viledriver‘s latest had such a blurb). Others’ feature almost no information, giving you little incentive to actually pick the album up. Infecting the Swarm‘s latest promo blurb falls into the latter category, giving me little information on the band’s sound beyond “blasts, dissonance and brutality”. A promise like this is easily delivered on and the band does give us what they set out to do. Infecting the Swarm claims to make music for fans of Disentomb, Defeated Sanity and Euphoric Defilement (who made a single album in 2013 and then vanished off the face of the earth). Neither Disentomb nor Defeated Sanity comparisons apply fully. Rather, I feel the best comparison is likely Spain’s Wormed, whose dissonant, almost machine-like Brutal Death Metal approaches texture in a Brutal Death Metal context similarly to how Infecting the Swarm do it.
Compared to Wormed, Infecting the Swarm are rooted more strongly in classic Brutal Death Metal. Wormed is primed to tear your face to shreds with its blistering speed, but Infecting the Swarm have that classic toe-tipping groove that survives even through the most fiddly of fretboard acrobatics. Infecting the Swarm recently moved from being a solo effort to incorporating a full band. I do not know how this album compares to previous outings, but you can tell that there is interaction between the musicians. The bass occasionally manages to play forward with slap and pops, drums manage to inject Jazz-tinged cymbal work into an otherwise brutalist drum performance. The only performance I am not quite sold on is the vocal, which are entirely comprised of a rather monotone tunnel throat. Vocal expressiveness in Brutal Death Metal goes a long way and it is often what separates the very good from the great. While Infecting the Swarm cannot quite reach the heights of the bands they chose to compare themselves to—reaching the quality of Defeated Sanity is a tall order—I can see that they have the potential for great in them. For now, I’ll take all the very good Brutal Death I can get.
