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Continuing an impeccable run that saw their two EP’s and countless singles catapult them from the underground to the main street of deathcore, PSYCHO-FRAME now have their debut album ready and strapped to kill.
Deathcore as a genre is consistent with its outputs, but consistency doesn’t always equal great as those are never mutually exclusive. In the last few years, we’ve seen bands rise from the seedy underbelly packing sounds you could only dream of. Enter PSYCHO-FRAME. A nauseating outburst of unthinkable proportions. Just looking at their artwork for their EPs alone brings an uncomfortable lump to your throat, but you can’t stop looking.
Salvation Laughs In The Face Of A Grieving Mother is one hell of an album title and grotesque album cover, especially for a debut album. But PSYCHO-FRAME have been building to this moment for two years. Opening the album with Blueprints For Idol Genocide you’re greeting with an obnoxious shotgun blast of a snare drum, a tongue-in-cheek sample before clenching its jaw around your throat for 40 minutes of non-stop two-stepping.
While you’re met at the start by the wall of sound, PSYCHO-FRAME do indeed show their technical side on songs like Still Water Salvation and the debut single The Portal. They’re both especially a showcase for what guitarists Jordan Crain and Hunter Young can achieve across their fret boards between hammer-ons and chugs as drummer and human landmine Leo McClain reshapes the structure of deathcore blast beats as we know it. I Won’t Be There To Watch You Go is as long a song as the title itself, fitting in speed and a ton of squealing guitars and sickening snare shots to make you tear up as it ends before you can even comprehend it.
Modern deathcore has a fixation on excessive vocalisation. Who can make the best pig noise? Who can make themselves sound like a clogged toilet in a hurricane? While we do have dual vocalists Colter Adams (Serration, Killing Of A Sacred Deer) and Mike Sugars (Church Tongue, Ex-Vatican), they’re not in competition with anyone, because simply they’re in a league of their own. And never has there been a more double-sided vocal duo with tectonic plate shifting abilities. The shrill highs and the demonic lows are impactful on their own but combine it with the band and mix it together, you get something utterly genre defining and uncompromising.
PSYCHO-FRAME even have the gall to swerve from their lane in the latter half of the album. Not only are they comfortable having the deathcore genre in a choke hold, but they’ve also even merged into hardcore and death-metal territory, without even batting an eye lid. It’s actually laughable how they can mold those two genres together on this album and not even have the courtesy to buy you dinner afterwards. And as Neuro++Terror comes to an abrupt end, it leaves you longing for more. There’s no fade out, no sample to end it. It just cuts to silence and you’re left sat there thinking about what you’ve endured and how that was all conceivable to the human mind.
Salvation Laughs In The Face Of A Grieving Mother is obnoxious, violent and repulsive. And that is what makes it beautiful. It’s a war-torn landscape of deafening snare hits and barbed-wire guitar strings that is possibly the closest we’ll get to an audio representation of hell on earth.
Rating: 8/10
Salvation Laughs In The Face Of A Grieving Mother is out now via SharpTone Records.
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The post ALBUM REVIEW: Salvation Laughs In The Face Of A Grieving Mother – Psycho-Frame appeared first on Distorted Sound Magazine.
