Review by Vinny for Cabinet - Hydrolysated Ordination (2024)

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.