Cabinet. At first glance, it seems like an uninteresting name for a band, mundane and banal, maybe even dull, especially for a band that otherwise presents itself as some sort of slime-dripping extreme metal entity. But one of the fascinating things about this Californian death metal band is how quickly the titular fixture takes on its unsettling, disturbing sense of menace and confusion, as soon as you've opened this up and taken in the weird images and steadily nauseating mise-en-scène; mmmmmm, photography of urban decay, death obsessed delirium, increasingly bizarre and inscrutable song titles, a logo that looks like something that I coughed into the sink earlier this morning. It all looks weird and wrong, and suddenly you're not so sure you want to open the drawers on that mold-covered, spore-and-lichen-caked , crumbling from water damage, severely neglected piece of furniture. It can't be good. Definitely not healthy. And so the strange atmosphere is in place by the time you hit play on this disc, so when you're suddenly sucked down by the riptide of aural, outrageous sonic sewage, you've got a sense of place.

And that place is awesomely terrible. Terrible and anguished and fucked-up, nightmare of swirling disease-soaked filth and decomposed organic matter and surreal atmosphere. The dense, multi-layered howling chaos that hurtles out of "Entering into the Mold " is at first suggestive of stuff like Portal or Impetuous Ritual, that berserker atonal collision of clashing chords and jet-engine percussive power, but I forget about that shit almost immediately a the song takes it into a droning, weirdly hypnotic mass of sound that rather skillfully blends D-beat trance-violence, chopper riffs moving in reverse, bizarre environmental sounds, gob-smacking drum fills, anti-gravitational vocal noises, and these little intricate filigree of dreamlike melody that curl around the edges of the songs bulldozing mesmer, up till it shifts into a time-stopping, utterly rotten death-doom groove. Seems kinda simple at first u8ntil you listen to it qwith your full attention, and Cabinet's tattered tapestry of vomit-splattered kaleidoscopic death metal unveils the mantra-like qualities that go on to boost this blast of regal decomposing spew.

Ending with some appropriately creepy field recordings, the EP keeps grinding its grease-and-bile-caked boot heel into your jaw, sliding repulsively back into that warped death-doom on "Gradually Melting into Self-Diminution and Dust" , the completely whacked-the-fuck-out percussive clatterblast and experimental dronedeath of "Captured in Permanent Presentiment of the Cornered Musk"; uh, is that a fucking trombone at the tail end of "Immortally in Perpetuum"? And the two-part metadata-fucking "The Concluding Decomposition of Cubical Claustrophobia / Manifesting the Eternal Circumambulation of Slowly Pulverized Decay " comes off as Carcass homage until you actually read what those words say, and the whole overarching theme and obsession of being offal in a drawer somewhere really starts to hit home, and the music unfolds into this shocking beautioful doom with interesting percussive and keyboard undertones for the first half, before the second reverses and erupts into bulldozing double bass chaos and a wall of down-tuned roar and freaky atonal noises .

It's weird shit. Sometimes it makes me feel as if I'm listening to some long lost Disembowelment session after those guys had spent an entire week listening to nothing but Am Rep noise rock. Others, those simple but yearning guitar lines imbue the otherwise gross overload with achingly romantic soloing, while what sounds like a terribly melted cassette of early Morbid Angel is being layered and intercut with field recordings from urban spelunking sites. I think at this point you probably can figure out if this is your kinda slime or not. The whole "psychedelic death metal" thing is everywhere these days. That's fine with me. The haunting and harrowing vibe this band pulls off is entirely its own. You can count this in as one of my new favorite death metal bands, surely. As a side note, this 2021 disc came out as an EP, but it't right up against rthe half-hour mark, you get a lot of slime stuffed into this.