A Skull Full of Maggots: DISROTTED – Self Titled LP Review + Stream

Hello slime lovers. If in the last few years you have loved doom and sludge bands like Primitive Man, Fórn, Laudanum, Funerary, Sea of Bones, Cough and Whitehorse, then Chicago-based extreme doom hellraisers DISROTTED are most definitely the shit for you. With no antics, no “post”-whatever fanciness, no pretension or desire to be refined or pompous in any way, Disrotted have simply set out to create the filthiest, most comatose, depressive, vile and lurid sludge-doom record you could possibly imagine.

Photo by Carmelo Espanola

This self-titled LP by the Chicago band in fact is so disgusting in its simplicity and explicit in its unforgiving ugliness that you will love it instantly, as its slime-ridden riffs, mammoth-like rhythms and sepulchral vocals slowly tunnel through your ruptured ear ducts like massive, undead worms. Borrowing more or less obvious elements from bands like Corrupted, Winter, Moss, Disembowelment, Grief and Noothgrush, Disrotted’s music is an ordeal of utter downtuned filth and completely mummified sonic hatred.

The vocals sound like the gurgle coming from the gaping wound in a zombie’s throat, the riffs are so crushing, downtuned and death-ridden that they feel like boulders falling off a cliff and crushing your every bone, and the overall atmospheres and moods the band present us with in their songs are just totally fucked; they are just the sound of total dread, of an enormous death-ridden coma dragging you by the ankles into the most bottomless and horrifying of oblivions. Some elements in the music, as seen for example in the opening minutes of Celestial Empire or of the final Restless Dead, even go beyond, touching the realm of drone and extreme doom, and evoking the swampy sonic hells of bands like Sunn O))), Asva and Atavist where drums are close to nonexistent and rhythms reach a weird state of disgusting stasis.

Overall, this debut by the Chicago threesome is nothing short of a huge alarm going off, a huge red flag being raised to signal that a rising star in American extreme doom is here to turn your skies black and your body and mind into a smoldering ball of nightmares and charred flesh. I don’t even know what to say anymore, this shit just drained all the life out of me just by listening to it. LP out now  through Diseased Audio.