Ulcerate
Of Fracture and Failure
Neurotic
Pulling the trigonometry
Even though we’ve come quite a ways on the schizometer from the kind of controlled cacophony that Canuck fuckers like Cryptopsy specialize in, it’s hard to talk about a band of utterly spasmodic, ultraviolent, extreme-ADHD, stick-on-one-riff-for-more-than-two-seconds-and-your-brain-implodes metalworkers like Ulcerate without mentioning the mighty ’Topsy. Whether it’s those death-tech masters or French prog gods Magma, when a band is led and envisioned by the drummer—in this case, Ulcerate’s drum magi Jamie Saint Merat—get out your abacus: It’s number-crunching time!
On Of Fracture and Failure, these New Zealanders’ debut full-length, Ulcerate cinch themselves as underground tech-spazz godheads. Nine excellently-played, excellently-produced songs of total tsunami-swirling mindfuckery that kill and kill again before you even know what hit you—or before you even determine if the wormhole-digging blurs were, like, real riffs or just some meth-driven guitar wank.
Closer inspection reveals a definite, and (most importantly) deliberate method to their madness: Songs like “Ad Nauseum” and “Failure” slither between huge jelly-jigglin’ groove riffs—à la fellow New Zealanders Dawn of Azazel and Immolation’s warbly weirdness—and jagged, mega-dissonant, stuck-on-fast-forward, cyborg-raping-human burns. New raw-hamburger throatist Ben Read does an excellent job maintaining balance and cohesion with the dual-guitar/bass-drum melees. Appropriately, the album cover art (allegedly created by Merat) features some octopus-looking, Lovecraftian alien creature that—much like these awesome, but hard to digest jams—just may remind you of the unstoppable Sigourney Weaver nemesis. Tech freaks: Bring your sleeping bags; there’s a lot here to study (and freak on). In fact, that may be the only complaint: There’s too much to chew on, sometimes at the price of repetition. —Shawn Bosler
