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SAVAGE PLEASURE
Savage Pleasure EP

Toxic State (2024)
Rating: 8/10

I hope that the crustier folk among you will remember British filthcore band Axegrinder, because alongside Amebix that’s the influence here for what is the latest outing from this New York act. Grimy gutter metal is the only way one can describe this as Savage Pleasure scrapes the barrel of Hellhammer and wields it to a world where bass lines spew rust, drums billow black fumes and the guitars smoulder and choke the vocals.

Conjuring images of pallid landscapes marred by industrialisation, songs like ‘The Glorious Descent’ come coated with soot preparing itself to waft across the polluted horizon before entering a pair of already gasping, dehydrated lungs. Some of the compositions here, like ‘The Sickening Fear’, rattle like late 80s and long lost deathly wallops smirking with a ghastly Venom-styled sleaze but with extra chunks of seriousness as the vocals smear their satanic sediment over the walls.

‘The Sickening Plague’ is grubby gutter punk, thrashy and violent and dripping with anarchy before the toxic doom of ‘The Reapers Scythe’ vibrates with a horror that forces the listener to envisage grey smoking streets, barbed wire wounds and flickering news footage of terror and tumult.

Grim, murky and coughing up rust, this 21 minute release exists like some rank first wave black metal demo that’s littered with doomy gasps and maniacal clattering, culminating in the harrowing dirge of ‘Chasms Of Distant Dreams’ with its distorted dragging and vocal slurry. It’s a juggernaut of a track that sums up the immense power of this incongruous and harsh machine that ploughs through a world which reverberates to the sound of its own jarring echoes and sulfuric snarls.

Neil Arnold

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