Red Chord, The - Fused Together in Revolving Doors (2002)^{Release ID: 5444}

The Red Chord has some interesting backstories behind their name and album titles. The band name comes from the opera Wozzeck; if I'm getting this right, a man was hypnotized to slash his lover's throat and strangle her with a string in the slashed throat, then he snaps out of hypnosis and asks, "My love, what is that red cord across your neck?" The name of the debut Fused Together in Revolving Doors references a nightclub fire in 1940s Boston; people were trying to escape via revolving doors, but it was so crowded and thereby impossible to escape that they were burned to death by the fire and assimilated to the doors. When you find a bizarre or tragic backstory in the name of a band and/or an album, you know that the music is also bizarre and, for the heavier ear, pleasing.

Fused Together in Revolving Doors is another early deathcore discovery for me that is love at first listen! I'm already years apart from when the band was active. I might suggest those songs for my brother to play in car rides, if he can handle this much chaos.

First track "Nihilist" starts with an insane blast of screaming deathgrind without ever lighting up. Continuing on is "That Certain Special Ugly" with the best lyrics in the album about "the worst joke they could have told". Next up is "Catalepsy", having some of the fastest brutality, starting awesome in the riffing without ever stopping. Psyopus did a comedic cover of that song as a hidden track for the album Our Puzzling Encounters Considered.

"Like a Train Through a Pigeon" blasts through in relentless devastation. The nature of the track keeps mauling you. "He Was Stretching, and Then He Climbed Up There" can be considered the album's intermission, a two-minute instrumental, sounding mellow in the acoustics. It segues into another perfect highlight "Breed the Cancer".

"L Formation" is another two-minute track, this one being a great song filled with different time changes, and apparently the lyrics are about chess. These guys have great talent and intelligence! "Dreaming In Dog Years" is perhaps their best song here. After an odd 5-second intro, it explodes into absolute mayhem, great for a live setting. Another one of the best, "Sixteen Bit Fingerprint", is a 7-minute epic with progressive structure, a bit like what Between the Buried and Me had at that time.

I just can't say no to this band's debut! I've listened to the more hardcore genres from The Revolution for 5 years, and nothing is as perfectly chaotic as this that's worth listening to. I look forward to checking out more of this unclean production in their later albums. It's this kind of raw production I prefer to hear instead of the lo-fi black metal of Darkthrone. It's thin in a way that everything can still be heard. However, you don't wanna make the production too clear, otherwise the experience would be far different from what it already is. Just listen to this brutal chaos, with perfection in everything!

Favorites: "That Certain Special Ugly", "Catalepsy", "Breed the Cancer", "Dreaming In Dog Years", "Sixteen Bit Fingerprint"