Immersion

Lingua disponibile: inglese

When you train to become certified in CPR, a technique many instructors teach is to pump the patient's chest to the rhythm of Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust". It has nothing to do with the instruments or the twisted irony of its lyrics (for what it's worth, the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" works just as well), but because the song's BPM matches the rate at which a human's heart pumps blood. Primitive Man, on the other hand, makes the sort of music that could be used in a class on how to bury a body. Deep, trudging, lumbering, hulking doom metal songs that set the perfect pace for stabbing a shovel into cold, hard dirt.

The Denver, Colorado band have been churning out a grim composite of doom, sludge, stoner metal, and noise since 2013, and their third full-length Immersion is another fine entry into their low-and-slow catalog. The six songs on this record take a physical toll on its listeners, grabbing you with beastly riffs and holding your ankles while dragging you steadily and unmercifully into their underworld of gruesome muck. Frontman Ethan McCarthy's hellish vocals oscillate between piercing shrieks of agony and gaping croaks of terror. The guitars, bass, and drums mostly work as one hulking unit; like the trunk of a decaying oak tree standing in stubborn defiance as its aged flesh rots and crumbles in the wind.

A track like "Entity" is cut with a wall of ringing noise, but the song never really builds into anything greater than what it begins with. It just keeps stomping, over, and over, and over, until it simply doesn't anymore. The bulk of the record follows that repetitive, almost instinctual rhythm, but there are flashes of death metal blast beats that come roaring through the intro of "Menacing" and gurgle through the chugging closer, "Consumption". Immersion is an artful slog, a grueling aural workout that's not exactly pleasurable when it's happening, but guarantees that runner's high when it's over. Some of the best metal is masochistic, after all. © Eli Enis/Qobuz