PYRRHON — Exhaust (review)

Album · 2024 · Technical Death Metal

4.5/5 · 2024-09-17
siLLy puPPy

PYRRHON was one of the first dissonant technical death metal bands to catch the second wave after bands like Gorguts and Portal busted the doors wide open and bands like Gigan and Ulcerate soon followed. This New York City band formed in 2008 and has been haunting the extreme metal underground for well over a decade now since it first launched its debut EP “Fever Kingdoms” in 2010. Wow, what a difference a decade makes for this band’s development. I have never quite warmed up to this band due to the fact that after i picked up its second album “The Mother of Virtues” a few years back that i just wasn’t as blown away as i was with bands like Gigan, Portal, Mitochondrion or the king of disso-death itself Gorguts. After all the hubbub about its latest release EXHAUST however i decided to jump back on the PYRRHON bandwagon and give em another try.

Popular doesn’t always translate satisfyingly brilliant to my ears so with some intrepid hesitation i jumped right in and all i can say is WOW! These guys have clearly been practicing their little nut sacks off since i’ve last encountered them and the results have paid off handsomely. EXHAUST displays a massive leap in sharpening the band’s strongest attributes of clanging out discordant bombastic death metal riffage laced with all kinds of technically infused sidetracking and excursions into proggy labyrinthine excesses however this time around the band has honed its skills to create stronger song structures that ebb and flow in a more consistent manner all the while upping the game in their performances with faster razor-sharp guitar riffs and squeals and a frenetic yet precision controlled bantering of percussion and bass abuse. Vocalist Doug Moore also delivers a heightened sense of death metal mania that veers a bit into the world of grind influenced screams.

Many disso-death bands have tested the patience of their audiences in recent years with bloated albums that pummel your senses past an hour’s playing time which truly is exhausting for such intense uncompromising metal rampage. EXHAUST features ten tracks that comfortably sit at the 38 minute mark which is really the maximum playing time that can sustain most of our attention spans for music this wild and crazed without any moments of catching your breath. While the opening “Not Going To Mars” insinuates one of those classically orchestrated disso-death albums in the vein of Ad Nauseam the short intro quickly bursts into action with an incessant raging flow of blitzkrieg riffing and brutal unrelenting motif and cadence changes all wrapped up in the ugliest discordant harmonic combos possible. Basically the band has clawed its way up to the top ranks of disso-death royalty by displaying a massive leap in instrumental interplay infused with a fertile fecundity previous albums didn’t quite muster up.

This is extreme progressive technical death metal at its finest with a labyrinthine maze of twists and turns lashing out like a wounded dragon writhing about spewing fire as it perishes and taking down the town with it. The surge of creative fortitude lurking about in every abscessed disease ridden track of atonal angularity is simply off the charts making EXHAUST a very exhausting album indeed not because you struggle to stay away but rather the challenge of keeping up with the absolute terror emulating from this quartet of quality noise masters. The controlled use of dynamics, time signatures and tempo deviations take PYRRHON into the ranks of high quality progressive composers without sacrificing nary a nasty quality that makes this anarchic tumultuous stew of crazy crafty disso-death steeped in all the aggression and energetic outbursts that is humanly possible. By far the band’s effort to date and one of the top disso-death albums to emerge in the last few years although this entire branch of death metal has become the top dogs in keeping the tech death metal world vibrant and evolving into the next levels of despair and horrific ugliness. Great job guys!