Back to the boudoir?

Have you ever wandered around a crumbling, decrepit, uninhabited house that's been left to go to seed for years, only to stumble across random household items, a water-logged picture album here, a tattered, rat-ripped cloth doll here, and an ominous piece of wardrobe furniture sitting rotting and dank inn the corner of some upstairs room with a hole in the floor? I have in my quasi-urban-spelunking days, and those places have a really particular atmosphere, echoes of past lives jumbled amongst debris, black mold, crumbling wood...

These guys, they tap into that.

Here's the more recent of the two Cabinet releases that the label sent me, Claustrophobic Dysentery popping up just a little earlier in 2022. It's the second entry from this solo project from Lord Sxuperion (also known as Matthew Schott, who also traffics in sonic slime via Garden of Hesperides, Sxuperion, Oreamnos, and Valdur) . The gruesome surrealist mega-violence that this Cali group has somehow tapped into remains unruly and uncontainable, so it's clearer that these contemporary ruin cruisers are going at velocity with their uniquely fucked-up and disturbing species of avant-garde death metal filth. I mean, from top to bottom, this band is weird. Named after a usually unassuming piece of furnishing. Displaying images of crumbling, moldering residences. Self-descrived "seplophobic death metal", inferring a deep and personal disgust with rotting organic matter. On the surface, that might seem par for the course for a death metal band, but there's something especially disturbed and disturbing about the downward vortex that Cabinet summons with the beginning of their album. It's definitely a few steps ahead of the sickening Portal / Mitochondrion / Impetuous Ritual-esque discordant horror of the Seplophobia EP, pushing its way deeper and further down into a tangled and putrid snarl of deterioration. What a mess, a glorious, mind-warping mess.

Endless and beginningless, but reading at a tight thirty-two minute run, Dysentery ruptures like a broken septic pipe, blowing jets of dissonant foulness over the buzzing chaos of opener "Claustrophobic Dysentery Excreted from the Chiffonier" , a vast swarm of infernal hornets whipping around seemingly formless percussive patterns, the structure of the music undulating and bending in on itself, as usual revealing bits of devastating riffage like the gleam of protruding white bone from a carcass, sickly atonal note progressions sliding over the surface, utter hyperviolent chaos-murk, abruptly opening into bizarrely pretty slowcore parts like an out-of-tune Codeine emerging out of cavernous death metal rot, brief moments of stark wintry beauty swallowed up again in the turbulent mass. Grotesque in its malformed immensity. Unnerving environmental noises and room sounds lead into blots of putrid necrotic ambience like the opening to "Bacteremiactic Basement Dweller (...in the Corner)", the scuttle of vermin beneath several feet of debris, but then scoured by those astringent guitars and insanely bowel-blasting , non-verbal utterances. Distant klaxons and sirens inject fear into sprawls of subterranean rumble, weird clock-like clangs echoing behind moreof those bizarre understated breaks and clots of grinding buzz. Nocturnal wildlife chattering while machinelike judder bubbles up from below. Crackling electronic loops and wayward bits of orchestral synthdrift tumble from simple but suffocating chord progressions.

Crazed chromatic riffing dominates "Hallway of Dacryocystotomic Depriciation" when the music isn't swirling down the doom-death drain of some vile vat. Cracked fragments of lullabies crawl out of slits in the peeling wallpaper like mites. The buzzing of malfunctioning electric lighting hovers over the vomitous chug of "Eternally Pendulemic Flourescent Bulb / Deteriorating Interminably", like coded signals from a discorporeal intelligence entombed in the crumbling drywall. The creaking, almost Nurse With Wound-esque soundscape "Outro (Foul Structural Rot)" that closes the album.

It's a coagulation of phasing madness. Uniquely decrepit. Obviously one recommended to fans of the sort of chaotic, deranged deathsprawl that Portal is known for, yes, but even more so the freeform stench of Cryptae. If either of those death metal bands scratch your itch, this is straight up your alley.