Cabinet - Pt. III: Get In... (Enter the Cabinet) (Bloody Mountain)
Cabinet (and the variety of projects marshaled by Matt Schott over at Bloody Mountain Records) have a policy of making heavy metal.
That might sound unremarkable for a metal blog, but surprisingly few
bands remember that the genre's core principle lay in making some of the
most disgusting, disturbing, dis-everything music possible—while making it bop, too. Cabinet pummel your ears for the sake of it, diving into their truly metal work
like a pig in shit. Everything they do seems motivated by the question
of how loud and how hard every instrument can get played—basically,
how bonkers the recording can sound—while still delivering the goods.
On their debut release, that meant pairing a satanic drum circle with
chugging guitars in an abyssal cavern; on their second, that
meant tossing in synths to accompany the patient tearing apart of every
sinew of every instrument's dazed, distorted tone. Here on Pt. III, as with everything Cabinet
has ever done, they just keep turning it up to eleven. Somehow, the down-tuned rhythm
guitars call to mind a clogged drain in a gore-spattered morgue,
greedily slurping down an effluence of rancid viscera. Bass lines
heave and sway like dripping meat on cold, rusty hooks; drum fills tear
jagged, soggy holes into unrecognizable slabs of flesh. Even the B-movie horror samples have gotten grosser, curving a familiar trope in death metal (almost) all the way back to deadly seriousness—to genuine, auditory body horror.
All in all, Schott's fixation with texture and manipulation of traditional
death-metal timbre is fresh and exciting. He creates an atmosphere reminiscent of the hallucinatory terrors of a band like Aeviterne—and maybe, just maybe, we could label Pt. III as "post-death metal" too. Yet again, Cabinet have successfully pushed metal "Furthur" in the Keseyian sense, and their new release requires the same disclaimer that Ken and his Merry Pranksters' slapped on the back of their eponymous bus: "Caution: Weird Load."