Faithxtractor – Loathing and the Noose Review

By Maddog

Faithxtractor’s second biggest musical contribution was the comment section from their last album. With a Farmers Only joke, a thread about metalcore album names, and a story that must be read to be believed, the birdbrain community’s mockery of Faithxtractor’s name has left me giggling for two years. Of course, the band’s biggest contribution was 2023’s Contempt for a Failed Dimension itself. Perhaps my favorite frill-free death metal record in recent memory, Faithxtractor’s fourth full-length dealt in riffs and also riffs. Unlike the other wannabes that litter the old-school death metal revival scene, Faithxtractor stood out through thoughtful songwriting. The album’s doom-tinged riffs were punchy, and its cohesive flow has withstood two years of wear. Ohio’s underground farmers are back with another slab of death metal. As I started spinning Loathing and the Noose, I knew what to expect.

At least, I thought I did. While Contempt for a Failed Dimension reveled in riffy simplicity, Loathing and the Noose is much more adventurous. Faithxtractor’s signature remains, with extra chunky riffs that alternate between furious death metal and Asphyxiating death-doom. However, while Contempt turned everything up to eleven, Loathing shatters the knob altogether. The most intense sections veer into blackened death-thrash, landing in between Morbid Saint and Panzer Division Marduk (“Fever Dream Litanies”). Even early Suffocation rears its head in Faithxtractor’s most bludgeoning brutal riffwork (“Flooded Tombs”). Spastic flailing guitar solos complement this unhinged assault on the senses. However, Faithxtractor ventures in the opposite direction as well. Loathing’s soaring leads and its melodeath-inflected riffs make it feel more melodic than Contempt. Meanwhile, the album’s starkest change lies in its bluer shade of doom. Faithxtractor’s melodic death-doom passages recall Swallow the Sun, displaying a newfound emotive side rather than merely adding heft. While Loathing and the Noose is far from an avant-garde record, it marks a sea change for Faithxtractor.

Miraculously, Faithxtractor’s experiments pay off. Even the most unexpected pieces are bafflingly powerful. Despite my knee-jerk skepticism, the melodic death-doom escapades are as evocative as the genre’s best (“Cerecloth Vision Veil”). Conversely, Loathing and the Noose’s speediest blackened cuts hijack my brain using frantic melodies and Marduk riffs (“Ethos Moribund”). These varied elements fit together with uncanny grace. The mid-section of opener “Noose of Being” mutates from blackened riffs to melodeath to sadboi death-doom to knuckle-dragging Autopsy worship, with fluid transitions that make each long jump feel like a natural step. Similarly, “Caveats” shines through its dynamic back-and-forth between an elegiac key melody and an enormous doom riff. While Faithxtractor’s round-trip transitions are sometimes abrupt, like the funeral-doom-and-back of “Flooded Tombs,” these are rare exceptions. Indeed, because it’s so well-crafted, Loathing and the Noose is an immediate hit despite its evolution; even the doomy seven-minute closer flies by, lodging into my memory by my second listen. Over-experimentation can be a turn-off, but Faithxtractor makes it work by whole-assing their every move.

Of course, it helps that the caveman segments slay. Even on its more adventurous tracks, Loathing’s overpowering death metal riffs are grin-inducing (“Cerecloth Vision Veil”). I have a soft spot for guitar solos paired with a dominant rhythm guitar, and Faithxtractor delivers on this with reckless abandon (“The Loathing”). If anything, Loathing and the Noose’s explosive tendencies make it a more visceral and infectious listen than its predecessor. And because the album’s climactic fury is sprinkled across each track rather than being sequestered, its 37 minutes are consistently lovable. While Loathing’s loud in-your-face master blunts its teeth, it remains a delight to revisit.

This is not the death metal album I was looking for. I showed up expecting a single-minded half-hour curbstomp. While Loathing and the Noose retains these simple roots, it does so much more. With influences ranging from blackened thrash to weepy death-doom, Faithxtractor’s newest record marks a transformation that initially left me worried. But its gargantuan death metal riffs, its smooth songwriting, and its excellence across its genre romps won me over. Contempt for a Failed Dimension was not just one of the greatest albums of 2023; it shocked me, revitalizing a subgenre that rarely rises above a 3.0. Loathing and the Noose sounds worlds apart, but checks the same elusive box. Mastermind Ash Thomas continues to understand my taste better than I do, releasing fantastic records in styles that often let me down. Keep an open mind and give this a shot.

Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Redefining Darkness Records
Websites: faithxtractor.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/Faithxtractor
Releases Worldwide: January 10th, 2025

#2025 #40 #AmericanMetal #Asphyx #Autopsy #BlackenedDeath #BlackenedDeathMetal #ContemptForAFailedDimension #DeathDoom #DeathMetal #DeathDoomMetal #Faithxtractor #Jan25 #LoathingAndTheNoose #Marduk #MelodicDeathDoom #MorbidSaint #RedefiningDarkness #RedefiningDarknessRecords #Review #Reviews #Suffocation #SwallowTheSun

Cave Sermon – Divine Laughter [Things You Might Have Missed 2024]

By Thus Spoke

When I finally heard Divine Laughter, it was closer to January 2025 than it was January this year, when Cave Sermon released it. This temporal technicality turned out to be trivial because its brilliance was immediately obvious. Divine Laughter traverses death, black, sludge, post, ambient, and more, exploring further, and committing harder to mania—as I later discovered—than debut Memory Spear, which I also devoured eagerly. There is primarily just one person behind Cave Sermon, Aussie musician Charlie Park, and until now, the project was instrumental. Miguel Méndez’ vocals—with an impressively versatile, unhinged, and savage performance—are a perfect accompaniment to what appears to be Cave Sermon’s signature abstract and interpretive compositional style, channeling a kind of musical stream of consciousness that must be experienced to be understood.

To say that Divine Laughter is affecting would be criminal understatement. The lyrics alone are touching in a sense totally devoid of sentimentality, reflecting a singularly modern capitalist loneliness, a hatred of human apathy, and a guilt in one’s complicity. But it is the truly magnificent way in which Parks tells (and Méndez narrates) this story musically which makes it so arresting. It feels, at its core, refreshingly and exhilaratingly organic; vibrant and smart and true. Reprises feel like the returning edges of a persistent thought, percussion is as often a tech-death texture as a sludgy battering ram (“Crystallised”), or a vague tap in a noisy void (“Birds and Machines in Brunswick,” “Divine Laughter”); barks pitch upwards into howls in sudden gasps of the realization of some depressing, mundane, and fearful reality (“Liquid Gold”). Quieter moments of almost folky naïveté brush up against acerbic sludginess, alien synth, and the pseudo-chaotically mixed nuts and bolts of razor-sharp death and black metal with a facile deftness I’ve not heard outside of Vicotnik’s work.1

With so few words, how can I convey Divine Laughter’s mania? Comparisons feel stale. The through lines, like paint in abstract art,2 play with and subvert the expected course of a given genre’s template. Energetic black(ened death)3 (“Beyond Recognition,” “The Paint of An Invader”) comes as a thrillingly uneven rain of vitriol. Angular, dissonant extremity tumbles into echoing industrialism, or dizzy ambience (“Beyond Recognition,” “Divine Laughter”); sludgy death remains off-kilter and wild, while charging prog-death rhythms stumble suddenly, (“Crystallised”) and spiraling solos precipitate turns to gazey post (“Liquid Gold”), and every other influence on display. Though there’s a rawness and frightfulness about the relentless transformations of guitar, vocals, and tempo, the use of synths and atmosphere, they remain surprisingly alluring thanks to the powerful emotions bubbling up in subtle resurgences of themes. A lot of this has to do with Méndez’ incredible vocal performance, another lot are these tangled, gorgeous compositions. There are so many of these beautiful, cathartic rises of yearning, urgent melody, and many of them come with the unforeseen force of involuntary emotional reaction (“Beyond Recognition,” “Liquid Gold,” “The Paint of An Invader”), though multiple listens show their edges were presaged.

The only potential stumbling block for Divine Laughter I can concede, is the noisy, sample-spliced “Birds and Machines in Brunswick.” Transitioning into the rather terrifying opening to “Divine Laughter” with its almost Portal-esque bellows, its five minutes stick out perhaps a little too much from the rest. It’s clear that this is an experiment, taking place in a transition period for Cave Sermon. Given the excellence of everything else about Divine Laughter, it is very easy to forgive this trifle. I can truly say that no album—at least in recent years—has so instantaneously affected me, smashing down the doors of my musical perception, and settling deep in my soul. Cave Sermon may have received shockingly little recognition so far,4 but they will no doubt soon be a name on the lips of many in whatever strange sphere of metal we find ourselves in.

Tracks to Check Out: Every one except “Birds and Machines in Brunswick” is mandatory listening.

#2024 #AustralianMetal #BlackMetal #BlackenedDeath #CaveSermon #DeathMetal #DivineLaughter #ExperimentalMetal #PostMetal #SelfReleases #Sludge #ThingsYouMightHaveMissed #ThingsYouMightHaveMissed2024 #TYMHM