Cabinet - Hydrolysated Ordination (2024)^{Release ID: 50776}

In my more attentive death metal listening days I was specifically drawn for a period to the sounds of Portal, Grave Upheaval, Impetuous Ritual and Mitochondrion.  Across this cross-section of bands I had found a sound that had moved beyond the simply inaccessible depths of conventional death/blackened-death metal, and had gone on to a whole new level of murk and squall.  Song structures where a redundant concept.  Dissonance and swarming chaos ruled these despairing depths.  Whereas some of my peers were utterly alienated by such music, the sheer abandonment of all conventional tenets of music theory really struck the right chord with me.

Cabinet are a modern version of that sound. Except Cabinet's version is like listening to Vexovoid if Portal had recorded it whilst out of their minds on crack.  Not content with just taking extremity far beyond any known levels, Cabinet add a cinematic quality into proceedings to create some real drama.  Now, do not get mistaken for thinking this is disorder.  It comes across to me that Cabinet have managed to download all of our nightmares from our subconscious minds and commit them to tape.  As punishing as it does often get, Hydrolysated Ordination never loses my attention at all,  Whilst I could be forgiven at times for thinking that the riffs were recorded in a whole different dimension altogether, and with the noise elements also being well-dialled in, this record never actually veers wildly off-road.  It does sound for the majority of the runtime like it is driving in the flow of oncoming traffice I grant you, but this is what makes it such a deeply immersive experience.

The unpredictability of the record soon becomes its trademark.  Tracks begin and end where you don't expect them to, sounds that you think you recognise the orign of turn out to be questionable in origin after repeated listens.  Is that a horn being played or just another wildly distorted guitar?  These are the type of questions that I found me asking myself as I worked through the terrifying yet wonderfully deviant eleven tracks on offer.  All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

Cabinet, also known as Sxuperion since 2014 and member of Oreamnos since 2023, is garnering favor among underground metal fans as one of the most unsettling metal musicians of all time due to a perfectly healthy sense of texture.  His album Claustrophobic Dysentery is my current pick for the best war metal album of all time for its masterful use of noise and ambient as frightening textural instruments while the black and death metal guitars reached extremities unheard of before.  I wasn't going to listen to a lot of metal albums for a while sine I want to get some more albums of other genres in my top 1000, but for Cabinet I will maliciously and gleefully break that rule like a Kitkat bar.

On "Masticated Inurnment of Dysphagiactic Soils," We start with an oddly dissonant death take on black noise which intentionally varies in production quality going from too noisy to proper to totally atmospheric, and we see the shifts just like this through the entire album.  it's like a fucking Neurosis track.  This is the typical genre-shifting behavior I expect from Cabinet, but they're clearly more focused on the black noise atmosphere taking a stronger, fuzzier charge than what was seen on previous albums.  The four minutes here masterfully shift from one place to another, while its noise also creates an industrial atmosphere that gives it an almost science fiction approach.  The way I see it, this has to be classified as an avant-garde metal album, as its experimentation is heavy and unrelenting.  Just listen to track 9, Worms Squirming Into Your Occiput / Turning To Mush, and tell me this does not qualify as an experimental album.

For the best example, the title track shows no hesitation in delivering weird and wild collections of black noise and dark ambient teaming together to create unsettling Blut Aus Nord style atmospheres.  This is the slowest track so far, and definitely the most disturbing, as there is less of a mechanic feel to it and is more traditional in the vein of general extreme metal.  This welcome addition to both the diversity and flow of this ever so unpredictable with a singular strong persence throughout really displays Cabinet's unwavering willingness to fuck around and just creep you out to the point of vomiting.

Some of these songs, however, are pure experiments in texture.  While these two minute songs will be packed with shifts from one general sound to another, these songs still feel too short in the end, especially since four of these songs take up the entire middle section.  This is a similar criticism I give to several songs on Low by David freakin' Bowie.  Although, the progression of these songs was nice, and almost akin to the variety of the so-called "melody" that took up much of side B of Abbey Road.  The nature recordings at the end of track 7 were especially welcome.  Even within the two minute songs, we never know what robotic or ghostly sirens will overtake any noisy, industrial guitar rhythms or when the next tidal wave of pure black noise will assault us.  However, it should be said that, while "Worms Squirming Into Your Occiput / Turning To Mush" is a fine example of this experimentation, its second half is too long and a little unwelcome.

Well, I'm once again very happy with the direction Cabinet took.  I've been eagerly awaiting another Cabinet ever since I discovered them, and I was hoping this would end up just as experimental as ever.  This is a finer example of what trying to be creative with an otherwise lacking genre can do.  Bestial black metal needs more bands like Cabinet, and along with Claustrophobic Dysentery, this is proof.  Even though this album has some flaws stemming from lengths, this is a weird and unique black metal album and one that I highly recommend.