VOTD 01/17/2025

 Deadbody: The Requiem (Closed Casket Activities)

Purchased used at The Attic

Ahem. Why the hell did I buy this? Any interest I have in metal and its many manifestations has more to do with the testing of musical extremes I suppose.

But why this one? I guess I got pulled in by the title, The Requiem. If I've had a general interest in requiems in general for the past few years, how does it manifest here?

And maybe I was at The Attic with money in my pocket and was buying one or two other things. Throw it into the pile. 

Of course it's nothing like a requiem in the sense of Mozart or Britten, or even Ligeti. Killing Joke opened their first album with "Requiem", a highly memorable song.

In this case, I don't know. It feels cheap for them to call a song "The Requiem" with the lyrics beginning: "Maggots feast upon your carcass." Yeah, okay, not that you can understand a single word of the vocalist's low, growly vocals. I often think of these bands as in the two categories of high, screechy screaming and low, gutteral shouting.

Deadbody certainly play up being dark and severe. There are hints here of something I'd find more interesting: an opening noise loop whose source I can't identify; a pitchless, percussive pounding on guitars and drums at the end of side one ("Joy of Torture", delightful) that starts to suggest Glenn Branca's guitar-orchestra-as-percussion noise. 

But when they hit the more straight forward heavy riffage, it plays into conventions. Do they know they're quoting King Crimson at the start of "Horrors of the Malformed"? To me it's obvious, yet I guess there's only so much you can do without quoting someone else, intentionally or not. 

I'm not certain which words you use as descriptors: death metal certainly, maybe at times speedcore? The entire LP clocks in under 22 minutes, with six of the eight pieces clocking in under three minutes each. And as I commented on Behold...The Arctopus a few blog posts back, there's a very rapid turnover of material and ideas, few pieces really settle into anything memorable. 

I get the desire for severity. The purpose here is to hit hard, bludgeon the listener. I don't want to sound like a snobby white liberal, but this band looks pretty much like what you'd expect: four white guys (well, one Hispanic), black tees, black jeans, no smiles. I know there are women in metal, but I wonder if there are any all-female bands that sound anything like this? This is such a male-dominated world, it would be refreshing to see and hear a female band play something even vaguely resembling this music. But then, if the band was all female, would it sound like this at all?

I'm sure there must be some group out there like that. I'm not going to spend a lot of time looking for them though. It reminds me of how impressed I've been with Pharmakon, a one-woman industrial-bordering on power electronics-band. I've seen her do it all solo and it's impressive, and here intense shrieking vocals overwhelm this band's low, male utterances.