Ohioan anti-supergroup Morbid Wizard return with an EP to back up the vicious onslaught they brought with their first album. Even the name of the release, Necrosis of the Eyeball, should be some hint as to the sonic extremity on tap, and though the four-piece (down a guitarist in the missing Bahb Branca) have solidified their approach somewhat over the course of the last year since they issued their 2011 Lord of the Rats debut (review here), there’s still a very real, very palpable threat of violence in what they do. At any moment, they might put their instruments down and cut you. No shit. You might not think so, but that works to the favor of the five-track, half-hour-long Necrosis of the Eyeball, the guitar of Scott Stearns keeping consistent nastiness throughout varied pace while drummer Corey Bing and bassist Mike Duncan underscore already low-end psychopathy with vomitous churn. Recorded separately, vocalist Jesse Kling’s screams are no less caustic than they were last time around or on his work with The Disease Concept on their own Liquor Bottles and Broken Steel EP (review here), lyrics vaguely discernible in the barrage of abrasive tonality. Bing also took part in The Disease Concept, and that’s only the most basic of connections that draws these players together. Over time in acts like Fistula, Rue, Sollubi, Ultralord, King Travolta and Son of Jor-El, they’ve helped typify their own brand of Ohio sludge, but Morbid Wizard might be the most cohesive showing they’ve had of that style, and likewise, Necrosis of the Eyeball brings these elements together with a fluidity and creativity that doesn’t necessarily work against the loose, dangerous atmosphere – only more vivid for the roughness of production – but instead giving an all-too-real sense of conscious choice. The difference between being hit with a hammer in broad daylight and being stalked and subsequently stabbed in the dark, let’s say. The results may be roughly the same bloody mess, but how you got there is the whole story.

Like its predecessor, Necrosis of the Eyeball arrives in a DVD-style case with artwork from Stearns, and though that and the short span between releases – not to mention members’ participation in other projects – might lead one to think there hasn’t been much development between the two, that’s just not the case. The recordings may sound roughly similar and the ethic may be along the same lines, but the execution has grown some, and so as the EP gets started with its slowest, perhaps meanest track, “Grave Chyld,” and Stearns tears through shredding leads and painfully slow riffing, there persists a sense of songwriting at work. A few of these tracks are – seems almost impossible to say it, and yet – catchy. Not so much the 9:29 “Grave Chyld” (the longest track on the release; points for the opener), which begins with a sample invoking Lucifer and is working more on bludgeon and killer soloing than on the memorability of its hook, the three songs that ensue – “Necrosis of the Eyeball,” “Chemical Fog” and the Cinderella cover “Night Songs” – each have a strong chorus, however caked in filth and fucked up that chorus might be. After the plodding, doomed mournfulness in the ending of “Grave Chyld,” the faster push of the title-track is both a surprise and seemingly a respite, though ultimately Morbid Wizard offer no quarter. Kling, who handles the samples, uses another at the beginning of “Necrosis of the Eyeball,” and when the riff is introduced, its metallic progression (punctuated by tom thuds from Bing), if played somewhat faster, wouldn’t be out of place on any number of death metal records, and that might very well be the intent, though when they break and Duncan’s low end rumble leads them to a chugging, lurching repetitive section, it’s all sludge. Extreme sludge, but sludge all the same. More excellent guitar solos persist through the slowdown, and though I was left wondering if they’d bring the pace back up to finish, they just sort of let the song fall apart instead. I guess even working with structures has its limits.

Read more »

Filthy. Horrid. Deviant. Region-spanning five-piece The Disease Concept should be ashamed of themselves for having made Liquor Bottles and Broken Steel – a debut EP not even a mother could love, so encrusted is it with its own nastiness. Of course, that’s the whole idea and the Ohio/Philly/New York fivesome revel in it, but man, this shit is abrasive, taking ethical basis from Ohio’s sludge and bringing it before two well-noted badasses on guitar: Dave “Depraved” Szulkin of Blood Farmers and Tommy Southard of Solace. The Disease Concept’s debut marks Southard’s first outing post-Solace (and, presumably, pre-Solace) and finds the Obelisk contributor’s signature heavy rock shred – see the end of closer “Soboxone Blues (Rock Bottom)” – coupled with the drugged-out psychosis of Ohio’s sludge scene, represented in the band by bassist Chris “Griff” Griffith, drummer Corey Bing and vocalist Jesse Kling, all of whom have been in and out of and around bands like Sollubi, Morbid Wizard and Pennsylvania Connection. The resulting stew doesn’t necessarily belong wholly to one side or the other, but is nonetheless unquestionably toxic. Though his vocals straddle a line between cleaner rhythmic shouts and screaming (skillfully veering to one side or another to add dynamics to the songs), Kling tops songs that masterfully blend abrasion and groove in a manner that stoner rock might have become had prescription narcotics been so readily available in the early ‘70s. Liquor Bottles and Broken Steel (released through Goat Skull Records in a DVD case with art by Scott Stearns) is 29 minutes/five tracks of viciousness that you have to stand back and be impressed by, because your only other option is to be bowled over as it steamrollers its way to the next victim.

The central blend at the heart of what The Disease Concept does on their first outing – put to tape and mixed by Big Metal Dave at Bad Back Studios in Cleveland over the course of three days at the start of this year – is crust and heavy doom grooves. On that level, it might not seem so different from a lot of sludge, but right away, opener “Black Cocaine” distinguishes Liquor Bottles and Broken Steel from a lot of what grows out of Ohio’s formidable and rotten underground. Based around a riff that’s more heavy rocking than dirge-minded (rest assured, that comes later), there’s a straightforward ethic at work underneath all the abrasiveness that’s almost – almost – regarding the listener as something other than an object to be pummeled into the ground. Make no mistake, there’s nothing about the EP that’s remotely accessible, but “Black Cocaine” might be catchy by some alternate universe definition of the word. In any case, Szulkin and Southard represent the Eastern Seaboard well riff-wise, and Bing – who’s proved time and again to be a master of sludge drumming – does no different here, riding out weighted rhythms alongside Griffith’s thick bass, which doesn’t so much undercut the riff that begins “Double Winner” as it does mark the song’s actual beginning when it kicks in with the drums around 45 seconds into the total 7:37 – an appropriate length for a song that’s about as dooming as a plane crash. The opening guitar progression seems initially to have something mournful in common with YOB’s “Catharsis,” but The Disease Concept would only be likely to approach a space influence to stab it in the belly, so the song quickly moves on to more violent territory, Kling recounting a narrative of a woman, “Two black eyes and a bottle of Jack,” in rehab apparently as a “double winner,” i.e. someone in Al-Anon and AA, an alcoholic also affected by someone else’s alcoholism, or as Kling puts it, “She took the pain train/Never coming back/Eighteen days on the detox ward/She tried to walk a straight line/Then she got bored.” So be it. The lyrics might be sympathetic if Kling wasn’t about to call the protagonist a dumb bitch for trying to kill herself.

Read more »