Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for Nightmarer - Deformity Adrift (2023)

Continuing my (unplanned) exploration of dissonant death metal – possibly sub-consciously engaged due to the promise of new Ulcerate next month – I have soon found myself at the door of Nightmarer and their release from 2023, Deformity Adrift. Now, before I put into words my thoughts on their sophomore release, I wanted to take a couple of lines to talk about why I like dissonant death metal. As a teenager of the 90’s, I grew up on a solid diet of meat and potatoes death metal and to this day I still enjoy playing many of the records from that era that still adorn my vinyl and CD shelves.

Fact is though that the death metal template soon gets old. Usually as one chunky riff ends, another one starts, or the frantic pacing overall takes little if any time to pause and take stock of where the song or track is at. What I find with bands such as Nightmarer is that the “normal” end point of a riff is carried further by often the slightest nuance, fluctuation, or inflection of picked strings. These atonal notes not only push tracks and indeed individual passages of tracks into new territory, but also act as links in the overall song structure (if done well enough) giving me something interesting as well as still punishing to listen to.

Nightmarer do the above well. Whilst not quite hitting the pummelling experience of Replicant or the vastness of Ulcerate, this four-piece (at the time of recording Deformity Adrift) manage to order their own brand of eerie chaos into an almost polished sounding offering. It does lack a sense of true depth to the sound, only really teasing the listener with the promise of thumping riffs and dense percussion every now and again. Tracks like Hammer of Desolation offer the best glimpses of this harder sound but at no point does the album sound tame or safe; Nightmarer by name, Nightmarer by nature still works as a phrase.

The bass heavy structures seem to rattle and reverberate as opposed to mine the depths of their foundations, and whilst there is nothing wrong with this, the album does still lack any true standout tracks or individual moments worth writing home about. Still, this is clever album that plays to the tag of dissonant death metal well. Perhaps the song lengths do need to hit the seven minute-plus mark on a couple of occasions to make this album sound more like a true heavyweight, but for now Deformity Adrift more than makes the weight.