Hey there, tech fiends. It's that time of the week again. Before we dive into today's focus, here's the usual weekly reminder that if you're looking for even more sick bands to hear, all prior editions of this series can be perused here.
Once again, Pyrrhon returns with a new gem that has multi-year staying power. As usual, I have to at least start off by getting the obvious dorkery out of the way when it comes to them. Although tech-death and "technical death metal" is often slang for just shreddy forms of death metal, Gorguts and Ulcerate on into the present with fellow innovators like Gigan and Baring Teeth, created new dark complex pathways as important as the more "normal varieties" of the style.
Although genre classification varies and some people circle around the post-death terminology, I find the latter term to mean even less than just saying a group is complex death metal skewing super dissonant and somewhat unconventional in its presentation. For groups like Pyrrhon, it's more convoluted, yet, my rule of thumb remains the same. What are the predominant sonic characteristics and where does it fit best? As such, I'd still call this skronky dissonant-technical death metal knowing full and well how wide a sonic net Pyrrhon cast beyond that which their fellow peers don't. And, I'm okay with being wrong in that assertion. I'm not the band, and, I don't make up goofy terms like post-death either so I'm not worried about it. I'm just another person who likes shit as fucking wild as Abscess Time entails and classification is secondary to this experience at a bare minimum.
Now that the usual dumbass shit someone always whines about is out of the way, we're here again to discuss Pyrrhon and their new album, Abscess Time. For reasons tied to both time and timing, we're doing this early album stream a week early and that extra advance for you all is definitely needed with how much of a dense mindfuck this album is. As usual, you can read on below for more about the album, or, skip to the music stream below which is what matters most.
If anyone is the person to dissect Abscess TIme in the three-to-four page length it deserves, I can admit it's not me. But, that is more a testament to the unique experience within it and how frequently the band and this album defies simple explanations even from a start-to-finish perspective alone. So, I'll attempt an alternative more "abstract" breakdown, one that eschews much of what I even planned to say because too much has been said here as is. And, this music does speak for itself, love it, or hate it. Take it all in.
In my estimation, from 2014's "The Mother of Virtues" on, Pyrrhon has set out to explore something that didn't really exist in its totality all that much before they came around. If The Mothers of Virtues was them doing their most noise rock and experimental focused work, then Growth Without End and Running Out Of Skin saw them laser focusing in on exploring their more technical disso-death, complex death-grind, and brutal minded ideas. Somehow, they still found a way to unite all these worlds at a higher level on their 2017 full-length, What Passes For Survival. While that album was incredible, and definitely saw them up their game, I'm happy to share that their new album, Abcess Time, is another step forward.
It's been clear for a long time Pyrrhon can excel at whatever they choose to hone in on when it comes to extreme metal, yet they've never delivered a distillation as pure and manic as Abscess Time does. This is Cephalic Carnage for the modern era to me if you take into account what that band did and how Pyrrhon is equally adept at traversing a wide range of genres and sub-styles. Carefully choosing when to reign things in, when to spazz out, which disparate sections might gel together, are all traits that remind me of Cephalic Carnage throughout Abscess Time. Especially the Lucid Interval-era stuff. You can sense the focused aggression, and uncanny fluidity between so many genres right off the bat but trying to really break most of these songs down is hard to do. Abscess Time is a modern-day masterclass from extreme metal junkies with multiple non-metal influences creating some of the best shit around for modern extreme metal junkies itching for something fresh to intake.
For some additional information, the band kindly shared with us that "Our new album, Abscess Time, embodies the anxiety and internal distress that we have experienced while living in the present-day United States of America. Many personal and cultural traumas rattled in our minds while we wrote this album: cultural/racial abuse, rampant gentrification, climate change, physical stress injuries, and the unceasing dysfunction of our government. This is an album for people who work and live every day feeling crushed by consistently negative societal change, and endure despite these challenges. It is about how events can slowly burrow into the psyche over time, while you're distracted by everyday life.
The musical language of Abscess Time is simultaneously referential and singular. We’ve compiled our wide range of influences in such a way that it’s sometimes difficult to discern where one thread begins and another ends. While death metal and grindcore have always been the foundation of Pyrrhon’s sound, there are many other subtexts to our style, including free jazz, noise, hardcore, indie rock, and more. Abscess Time feels like a fully realized culmination of the aesthetic course that we have been pursuing for over a decade."
I'd urge you to check out our early stream of Abscess Time that's embedded below. You can pre-order the album via Willowtip Records here and here. You can also follow the band over on the Pyrrhon Facebook Page.
