Deleterious – Highly Recommended EP

Deleterious are a four piece outfit from Holland. The band were bought to my attention by Mr. Japenga, who handles drum duties for both Deleterious and Terzij de Horde, at the latter bands recent UK show. The band have made the latest EP, ‘Highly Recommended’, available to download on their website. If you like the sound of what lies before you, give it a listen. If you like what you hear, get in contact and purchase a CD!

‘Highly Recommended’ is perplexing, confrontational and outright odd from the get go. Opaque, inconceivable time signatures pave way for a myriad of influence that proliferates throughout the EP. Old school thrash, extreme metal, jazz, avant-garde and experimental underpinnings dance and dissipate under the fray of drum work. Cohesive snippets of sound recoil and interject riffs mid play allowing the outfit to cover a scarily large catalogue of sound in relatively little time. We are talking old school thrash freefalling into atonal avant-garde beats as bass and lead guitar form their own unique personality within a matter of minutes. The first track alone exhausts my vocabulary. I haven’t even had the chance to mention the cascading speed of black metal flare-ups that cement the vista of styles and ideas this band can conjure and conquer in smaller time frames than bands can build complete albums from.

Piecing this EP together is nigh on impossible. The interactivity between all elements of instrumentation is beyond words. Steven van Lint’s bass work amalgamates the distant worlds of guitar orientation and time signature abduction with unnerving beauty. You are jumbled and shuffled between maddening riff counts. Constantly left in the trodden territory of the previous second, insanity the only real outcome your detailed attention will ever unveil. You are left completely at the mercy of the juggernaut before you. The unity of a band whose vision and direction never once falters or stumbles on the monumental task they have set themselves. One of the most attention grabbing pieces of metal I have heard this year.

The most perplexing aspect of the EP is the organic feel to the sound. The bizarre arrangements of influence and song structure that Deleterious have amassed over the short 21 minutes of this EP should, almost by necessity, dictate complete unrest and unruly discord. Simply labelling this avant-garde and being done with the migraine inducing process of description and translation from sound into word would not do the music justice. Not one element feels uneasy throughout the demanding listen. You will be taken by surprise and will more likely than not come out the other end unsure what has just erupted before you. It hardly helps then, when during the final track, clarinets and a bumbling, walking bass reveal the jazz underpinnings that have thrived on a cask metal framework all along.

Highly recommended to all LURKERs.

Download / Deleterious

You'll find me in the vast wilderness of British Columbia, talking metal at LURKER, or working in publishing and front-end web/eBook development.

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