Wormed – Exodromos (Willowtip, 2013)

Hard to believe it’s been a decade since Wormed took us into the maw of the death metal black hole with Planisphaerium; in that time, numerous bands have attempted to rip off the quintet’s science fiction-influenced brutality, but none have been able to measure up to the intergalactic maelstrom these Spaniards were capable of unleashing so effortlessly with their stunning debut.  At last, Wormed’s long-awaited sophomore album Exodromos is about to drop via that exalted bastion of mind-altering extreme metal known as Willowtip Records, and to say it was worth the wait would probably be the understatement of the year.

From the opening photon-torpedo blast of “Nucleon,” it’s evident that the band’s time exploring the far reaches of the universe was time well spent.  Wormed have re-emerged from the void as an even deadlier beast, upping the ante in every conceivable fashion here; better songs, better production and better performances are just the tip of the asteroid.  It might be hard to believe that these guys could get any more devastating than they were ten years ago, but that’s exactly what’s happened here.

As one might expect, the musicianship on display throughout the album is off-the-fucking-hook.  Each song is a tightly wound exercise in death metal chaos theory, where down-tuned and dissonant Voivod-on-crack riff-workouts rub up against the gnarliest of slow-grinding slams.  I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again (and again); out-of-this-world chops don’t mean a goddamn thing if you can’t write a song, and Wormed definitely have the compositional skill to back them up.  The band knows how to do brutal ‘n’ burly, but they also inject the songs with an almost unheard of level of nuance for this style of death metal; there are parts of the album that are so textured that they could fit in on a post-rock album.

The sound of Exodromos fits the music perfectly; cold, clinical and streamlined like the curves of a starship.  The album doesn’t so much crush as slice through the cosmos; all sharp edges and hyper-speed, but that isn’t to say that Wormed aren’t capable of galaxy-collapsing heaviness when they slow things down. Every instrument is audible, which allows one to fully appreciate the head-spinning technicality Wormed infuse their songs with.  The crystal-clear production serves not only to allow Wormed to demonstrate their considerable skills as musicians, but also to accentuate the creepy atmosphere of the songs themselves.

Atmosphere probably isn’t the first thing one thinks of when it come to brutal death metal, but Exodromos possesses it in spades.  The band’s aforementioned use of dissonance, as well as subtle synths and sound effects lends the album a haunting, ghost-ship in deep space vibe.  Come to think of it, the album would’ve made a perfect soundtrack for Paul WS Anderson’s Event Horizon, bending time and space towards a dimension of pure malevolence.

I said in my review of Defeated Sanity’s Passages into Deformity that they had set the bar incredibly high for brutal death metal in 2013, but I’ll be damned if Wormed haven’t equaled or even slightly surpassed that awesome slab of musical mass destruction with Exodromos.  We’re only two months into the year (three by the time this album officially drops in March) and Willowtip already has not one but two masterpieces on their hands.

http://www.wormed.net/
http://www.willowtip.com