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FILTHEATER
Obfuscated EP

Vargheist (2021)
Rating: 8/10

When the opening chords reverberate to announce this new Filtheater EP, I feel like I’ve been suddenly hit over the head by a trash can.

This three-track release, like all offerings before, is the work of one man, namely K.J. (aka Jared Moran). The Mississippi-based multi-instrumentalist is a creator of chaos who dabbles in unrelenting underground clanking to the point you’ll start thinking you’ve got trouble with your pipe work!

You won’t hear many releases this year as squalid and uninviting. Opening track ‘Cadaverment Entanglement’ just vibrates with lo-fi, holocaustic bass prangs, and everything just follows like a clattering mess of garbage thrown out the window onto unstable scaffolding. Call it death metal to make it easier for you, but in reality it’s a nightmarish, tumultuous migraine that judders like a scrap metal truck bereft of a wheel.

Vocally, it’s just a nasty sneer caught up in a wired web of fibre glass and steel wool, where horrible guitar chords just provide extra layers of mess and nausea.

‘Dripping Despair’ makes things no easier; a hectic, boiling geyser of toxic chemicals vomited forth. It’s not industrial but it does belong in such industrialized horror; a grating mash of evil and grinding basement anarchy, leaving you to question its creators mindset as ‘The Fog’ completes the tirade with further clanking, clattering terror.

Obfuscated runs short of 14-minutes, but it’s time you won’t get back as you become strangled in this barbed mesh of an EP that takes death metal to farther indecipherable realms where not many fear to tread.

Neil Arnold

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