What’s the result when you combine a dash of sludge metal, a cup of death metal, a pinch of hardcore, and a tablespoon of grind? Resin Tomb—some of the stompiest deathgrind this side of the Pacific Ocean. Following two very solid EPs, debut Cerebral Purgatory aims to provide the listener a crash course in auditory slaughter. To set a foundation “Dysphoria” wastes no time kicking things into high gear with dissonant riffs, delicious bass, and forceful blast beats. That’s the overarching theme across this album: it’s heavy as balls. The rest of the album continues in this fashion, with highlights including “Flesh Brick” and “Purge Fluid” to provide a duo of perfectly gym-able tunes to get some real gainz, yo. Unfortunately, while this album is quite short—under 30 minutes—I find the staying power to be somewhat lacking, among other things.
Most of the songs work well, but that’s just it. Each cut is so focused on aural violence that it ends up blending into the others. At times, Resin Tomb chooses to enact oddly-placed ambient outros, such as on “Human Confetti”, where the end comes with the sound of train cars zooming through a station (which is reminiscent of a great Black Dahlia Murder song, “Phantom Limb Masturbation”). This kind of ambience doesn’t feel like a fitting end to this kind of violent song, and leaves parts of Cerebral Purgatory not memorable enough to stick out, such as how “Scalded” leads into the title track in an indistinguishable way. Ultimately, I get that this is not meant to be an album to analyze for its technicality nor how it innovates upon itself across the runtime (perhaps I’ve been consuming too much prog). But it’s imperative for albums like this to stick the landing all the way through or else they run the risk of becoming uninteresting after a few re-listens. Thankfully, for the most part, I do enjoy Cerebral Purgatory. It sufficiently kicks my face in while having enough good parts to make me want to come back. The gorgeous cover art by Mitchell Nolte doesn’t hurt either.
