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CHAOTIAN
Effigies Of Obsolescence

Me Saco un Ojo / Dark Descent (2022)
Rating: 8.5/10

Swarming like a black, hellish plague, Chaotian releases its full-length debut from its own fetid bowels. This Danish band has been on the watch list of many due to their first two demos, Where Gods Excarnate (2018) and Festering Carcinolith (2019). As fans we’ve waited patiently for the uprising of this bestial death metal Neanderthal and now it’s upon us like some slathering gloop, within which hides are twisted riffs that make early Morbid Angel sound like a line-dancing hoedown.

Chaotian embrace an early death metal miasma but marry it with that cavernous, belching, billowing swamp gas that’s doing the rounds nowadays. So what you essentially get are faster flurries of embalming fluid injected into your veins which in turn scurries as entangled solos of utter chaos.

At their slowest, these guys churn great vials of rancid, blubbery fat whereby hefty percussive pounding toils with congealed, fatty bass lines and dense, primitive riffs forged of fire and flesh. Throw in a hideous, chesty vocal serenade and you have Effigies Of Obsolescence, a gnashing, eruptive well of sickness that overflows like a belching geyser dribbling pus-riddled tumult.

Everything here feels deep and heavy, typified with the boiling mass of ‘Gangrene Dream’ with its contorted riffs and flashes of frenzy. It’s matched only by the nasty tirades of the jarring ‘Into Megatopheth’, which comes drenched in gargantuan chugging depicted accurately in the rusted cover art whereby crumbling, hellish monoliths are eroded by seas of scorching larva.

Again I refer to the blinding percussion attacks of Andreas Nordgreen, a bestial octopus reaching beyond the pale to execute tight yet bludgeoning rhythms. The enormous riffs are crafted like great Lovecraftian columns – esoteric nightmares constructed from bewildering imaginations.

The vile echoes of the title track scrape the membranes of the soul as those early 90s structures metamorphose into further examples of otherworldly barrage. Draughts of howling speed, brutal blizzards and stormy torrents all fuelled by a meaty guitar sound that runs like a river of foaming fury through the primal wastes.

‘Festering Carcinolith’ is plucked from the second demo and given extra vim where those twisted riffs cavort through the mire of thick, enveloping mesh. Meanwhile, ‘Fustuarium’ – whatever that means – somehow conjures images of exactly that, a thing I know nothing of but can see in my mind’s eye as the crypt fumes waft as pungent rays of thrashing death hostility, rarely letting up in their sepulchral rush except for occasional mid-paced dissonance.

And what of the devastatingly rank odour of ‘Adipocere Feast’, which begins as a slow-moving gurgle of oozing axe work and doomy plods, then speeding in tandem with those sickly burps before a rush of deathness consumes.

The same of course can be said for the hideous ‘Etched Shadows’, which is a mechanical juggernaut of billowing blood, spouting shards of gore that impact the vast walls around it where everything is caked in a clay-like substance which coats every instrumental outburst.

Chaotian exists within its own framework of hardened flesh, a deluge of chunky, spiteful expressions we thought we had prepared for in our anticipation but were still decapitated by its wailing fury of morbidity.

Neil Arnold

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