December
The Lament Configuration
Earache
Produced by Devin Townsend? Oh my fucking god, the game has just been taken up about 39 notches. Townsend is always able to bring a whole new palette of sonic emotions to the table, all of them nasty, negative, and hysteria-inflicted. The Lament Configuration is the sound of extreme metal being chained to a table and then dissected, prodded, mutated, and examined – lying on a gleaming steel table, shivering, confused and really angry.
Fear, rage and violation are here distilled into the perfect sonic elixir. The proof is in the shrill screams, desperate vocals, seesawing rhythms and lightning fast chord changes. The rhythm section and guitars are both uncannily tight and completely spontaneous in a sort of free jazz meets Hellhammer kinda way, and the vocals, fuck me, they shift all the way up and down the visible light spectrum, effortlessly. December make metal stripped of bravado and confidence, the end result is all about the most feral of survival instincts.
They’re from Reno, Nevada, which sort of figures; I’m extrapolating here that perhaps their music is sort of a disgusted bile-fuelled reaction to being so close to capitalist overload. Or it could just be the cheap speed and the blood rituals. Did Matt Zane lend them snuff films? First American band signed by Earache since Hate Eternal? Well then, god fucking bless America. This is the real shitfuckevilnoise.
All ten tracks race by like a pack of wolves. December cram more sensory overload into one album than many bands manage in an entire career. Listening to The Lament Configuration is a dizzying, disorienting, and disturbing experience. I just can’t do justice to how fucking good this is. Those lab animals will only take so much, y’know…
Earache Records: http://www.earache.com • December: http://www.december1.com
