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CHESTCRUSH
Apechtheia EP

Self-released (2022)
Rating: 8/10

After last year’s soul-gripping Vdelygmia debut full-length, Scottish brain bashers Chestcrush return with a new EP and as expected it’s the sort of noise you have to board up the windows in preparation of. Three songs, 28 minutes, and a much needed doctor’s appointment after said experience.

Death metal, grind, sludge, and just noise… everything about this is either dragging or hammering with blackened passages of morose sediment that fill your mouth like globules of soot and ash. The vocals are long, drawn-out barks of horror that coat the rest of the sonic, ambient (!) sludge with a hardened crust.

The nine-minute opener ‘Misery. Decline. Death’ does have its faster, “deathlier” blasts, but for the most part it exists as a harrowing and utterly crushing slab of rugged extremity. Meanwhile, ‘The Despiser’ begins like a twisted episode of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks before lumbering through the ash like a billowing golem inhaling the black fumes from its own rusty orifice.

Apechtheia is just about unease and discomfort even when veering towards a more death / grind steadiness, but it eternally remains a blanket of weight that only lifts when closer ‘Repression’ emerges as some distant industrial clank bereft of any grinding death; an underwhelming, or possibly more so subdued ending to such a debilitating blend of noise.

Chestcrush is one of those bands you struggle to review just because of the sheer power of the grinding death they produce, but if you want total annihilation for the neighbours then make this your choice for destruction.

Neil Arnold

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