Here we go. That inevitable time has come when we must contemplate this new release –PISSGRAVE‘s Suicide Euphoria – brought to us by Profound Lore Records. First, the appalling cover art of this album is literally shoved down our throats in all its crude and unmistakable “honesty.” One does not simply look at this band’s album art, but is more like forced to tolerate it. The band did not even bother touching up the colors or making the artwork a bit less “bare bones” (no pun intended!), opting instead to grace their album with crude photography that looks like it came straight out off a nightmarish crime scene or from the mind of the most fucked in the head and mentally deranged freak. I’ll bet any money that the band took this imagery from Gore Junkies – it’s the only possible explanation, shit like this does not exist anywhere else. The amazing thing is that the music contained on this this disc does the art 100% justice, because we’re talking about some of the most barbaric, bestial, inhuman, cruel, sadistic and deviated death metal/grind we have set ears on in a loooooong ass time.
As soon as “Perpetual War” kicks off, you know shit’s fucked from the start. The band wastes no time elaborating on any kind of “elevated” thought, or bothering to even contemplate intros or buildups. That shit’s just too artsy for them, so instead they opted to launch into an immediate mauling of the listener with some of the most tangled, disconnected, rabid and chaotic death-grind riffs ever to be heard – which from the first millisecond of the album are already in full swing and spinning out of control. What follows is a complete shit storm of flies and maggots coalescing around a screaming mountain of rotting flesh and torturous nightmares. The stench of this album is nauseating, the atmospheres are vomit-inducing and the sheer tonnage of aural filth that is poured by the bucket into the listener’s ear ducts is fucking inhuman.
The vocals sound nothing like a human being. What you get is some kind of demonic grunt being howled through a sewer pipe deep down in the pits of the most disgusting slums, and being choked out by sewage and slime entering its nostrils and throat. The guitar tone is almost annoying. The production is so compressed, blown-out, saturated and chaotic that at times you even have a hard time understanding what the fuck is happening to your ears, whether they are hearing what is really going on in the record or if auditory hallucinations have taken over your ass. In either case, this record at times seems “impossible” or “unlikely,” or that it may be some kind of really bad joke or an extremely distasteful and insulting pile of deliberate disgust. This album, in fact, hates you, and it makes it clear.
Whether it is trying to disgust you, annoy you, frighten you, or just fuck with your ears and senses, Suicide Euphoria shall remain as one of the most inverted, depraved, insulting, negative, ass-backwards and anti-human albums to see the light in 2015. If Pissgrave were trying to fuck with our sense of decency, then they have accomplished their mission with flying colours.