PHYLLOMEDUSA — Beast Of The East (review)

PHYLLOMEDUSA — Beast Of The East album cover

Album · 2017 · Sludge Metal

4/5 · 2017-06-10
Vim Fuego

So what did you do for Save The Frogs Day, April 29, 2017? Not a thing? Didn’t know such a day even existed? The day is marked every year near the end of April. Don’t know why anyone would give a slimy green shit about frogs? It’s a good thing Phyllomedusa exists then.

OK, it would be hypocritical of me to pretend I’d heard of Save The Frogs Day before I discovered Phyllomedusa. The band’s only member big frog is somewhat obsessed with frogs, toads, newts, salamanders, and caecilians. Not heard of caecilians? Once again, neither had I. Look them up. They are snake-like, burrowing, almost blind amphibians. Besides fantasizing about frogs, big frog makes some incredible, and at times, incredibly challenging, music. He blends grind, noise, and sludge in immense distorted compositions, often overlaid with frog calls and horror movie samples, observed from an avenging amphibian’s angle.

The quality of Phyllomedusa’s music varies greatly. Some releases are so badly recorded they could just be a microphone stuck in a jet engine’s backwash. Other times, it sounds like a Mortician record played at about 4 r.p.m. Fortunately, ‘Beast From The East’ is of a higher quality, a voyage into the deepest sludgy primordial swamps imaginable. There’s no messing around with introductions. First track “Accidental Colonization In The East” drops straight into a massive distorted groove, with big frog snarling over top of it. It is a visitation into a grinding bass driven subterranean world where speakers emanate frequencies nothing man-made has any right to transmit.

There are instruments in there somewhere, but it is impossible to tell where bass and/or guitar ends, drums begin, or what species the vocals are actually coming from. And this happens six times, at various tempos between sluggish and tectonic. There are a few anti-human samples thrown in, but basically, it’s the same massive fucking song repeated again and again. There seems to be little in the way of riffs or distinguishing features differing from song to song, but the overall effect is so heavy, so powerful, so primitive, and so primal it matters not.

There may be incredible herpetological lyrics involved here, but there is no way to understand a single word. Imagine a nine foot long bullfrog with chronic indigestion complaining about it to a neighbour half a mile away and you might have some clue as to what big frog himself sounds like. He groans and burps and croaks his way through the six songs here, never once emanating a sound which sounds even vaguely human.

And to big frog’s message. Why is it important to keep a closer eye on frogs? Being amphibians, frogs spend most of their time in wet or damp conditions. Unlike reptiles, their skin has no scales, and is constantly exposed to the environment. This means frogs are incredibly sensitive to any sort of environmental changes whatsoever. They are in effect unwitting environmental barometers. The current prediction from the frogs? Well, the planet is in the shit, and it seems humans are to blame. Amphibians are generally quite a sturdy bunch. They first crawled from the sea about 370 million years ago, and seemed to like water, so headed for the swamp. Amphibian species seem to have been going extinct of a rate of one per 500 years for most of the intervening eons, until humans came along. Up to 200 species may have disappeared since 1980. The causes for this are man-made- pollution, infectious diseases, habitat loss, invasive species, climate change, and over-harvesting for the pet and food trades.*

We are the murderous, destructive bastards, and big frog wants to see an end to us, to save the frogs and thus the world. We were warned.

*Source: https://www.savethefrogs.com/about/why-frogs/