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RAWRORR
Solipsism

Self-released (2018)
Rating: 8.5/10

When this album landed on my desk I was intrigued to know what the title meant, and apparently “solipsism” means “the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist – the quality of being self-centred or selfish”.

Rawrorr is a two-piece act from the Ukraine consisting of a chap named Toadkiller Dog, who is responsible for vocals, bass and guitar, and he’s accompanied by drummer Genestealer. They formed out of Odesa in 2016 and Solipsism is their first release, and it’s a record sure to please anyone with a fetish for dark, deep-sounding death metal.

There’s a real doomy, earthy quality to this record, as from the off the duo hammers us with ‘Crystal Crypt Of Unsociability’. The track has a brooding, meaty structure of battering percussion and sneaky, seething guitars, but it all feels so dense and stuffy as if the duo has recorded this in some blast furnace. The whole feel is one of well-fanned flames as Toadkiller Dog burps out incredibly deep and rough vocal grinds, but things get extremely heavy when the band slows its pace and becomes an arrogant, toiling force of utter darkness.

There’s plenty of menacing melody to behold as the track trudges with malevolence, and that theme escalates with the cloying fires of ‘Obliterate The Warp Of Divine Entity’. This is a brooding slog of a track where Dog bellows “Decay and scabs… gifted with rabies”, the sort of squelching, fusty morbidity I’d expect from Autopsy.

Sure, this sounds like old school death metal, but it also sounds of its own time and place too, whether in the sombre dwelling of ‘Abysmal Fundamental Oblation’, with its Swedish-styled guitar tone and murky drum nod, or one of my favourite tracks, the crushing ‘Expectating Overall Pizdetz’, which rumbles and spits and coughs so much blood, shit and matter that one cannot help be swallowed by it all.

And kudos to Genestealer’s percussive performance, who knits this whole scorching smörgåsbord together with his tight yet sombre thuds. The twosome churn out such heavyweight splatter, that even when they quicken proceedings the sound remains so thick. Just check out the squalid traipse of ‘Erebus / Terror’; an utterly compelling chunk of rotten death metal in which the bass splodges itself like heavy daubs of thick blood upon the pavement and Toadkiller Dog’s vocals take on new sickening heights of gore-soaked pleasure.

As this track plods along, I realise I’ve not heard a sicker, more wretched song for some time, and that’s without the death-thrash punishment of ‘Impermanent Stare At Charred Stumps’ and the rank, meandering gloom of ‘Apotheosis Of Transtectonic Procession’. in which Toadkiller pukes, “Death like reason for satiation, Shells are sodden with the scum, Three ages of existence crawling, From the furiousness to oblivion” before the furnace is fired up again for another abysmal blast.

Lyrically astute and yet so dark, stuffy and grim, Solipsism instils the same sort of excitement I experienced all those years ago with Autopsy’s 1989 debut patter of splatter Severed Survival. Only this time we have a band eager to coat such gory platforms with their own hideous crust of sickness and thickness. This one stinks to high heaven of quality. Prepare for the queasiness!

Neil Arnold

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