Volatility can be a welcome element in music as long as the listener is in the right mind frame to handle the experience. That can mean a lot of different things depending on the audience, but bands and records that seem to be barely holding onto their sanity hit home for me, not that I want real people to be suffering. But a little can be good and it can make for great art.
Coffin Apartment’s third record “Lesion Plea” sounds like one of those created under duress, rapid-fire takes, and disasters that popped up along the way. That’s because that’s what actually happened and might be what makes these seven tracks so sticky to me. The band—vocalist/guitarist Johnny Brooke, bassist/synth player Taylor Lauritsen, drummer/vocalist Justin Straw—piles more heaping helpings of doom and death into their manic puzzle here, and each track lures you into the madness and refuses to release its grip until you’re satisfactorily impacted. The record is hypnotic, ghastly, gurgly, unsettling, and warped in the best possible way. It’s like the portrait of a temporary breakdown committed to tape forever.
“Duplicitous Offering” opens with guitars hanging like a phantom, and then the drums pummel, and warped howls dig deep into your psyche. The playing gets burly and harsher, battling through sludge, the drums crashing out and making your ears bleed. “Evade the Knife” starts eerily, Alex Juarez’s sax blasting, the playing swimming in ether before the pace picks up. Guitars drip and then kick into higher gear, growls smear as the tempo races into a snarling fury, doom landing heavily in the back end before melting into cold guitars. “Nocturnal Slope” has chimes carrying over from the previous track, strange energies gathering, pained howls crawling over an elegant guitar stream. Things grow darker and uglier as the howls scar, guitars slicing and bubbling before stomping the gas pedal. The attack thickens and batters, cold notes slithering down spines and into the darkness.
“Accumulated Guilt” fries your brain upon entering, sax marking a path, drums echoing as crooning from Dry Wedding’s Davey Ferchow lurches through the scene. You can’t help but shake the strange pulses traveling your spine, screams striking as hypnosis is achieved, swarming through the last gasp of emotional detachment. The title track has guitars heating to a boil, growls curdling as the playing chugs, the air growing thicker and grittier. The pace strangles before moving to a slow battering, a thrashy push driving everything to the brink. “Topography of Pain” starts as a clean and strange form, and then it combusts, the vocals devouring sanity, snapping with whip-like intensity. The guitars turn a shade of black metal as harsh cries pull down walls, hurtling toward a tornadic buzzsaw that bludgeons and darkens eyes, moving into closer “Drowning in the Centuries.” The guitars lines helicopter as screams strike and tighten their grip, simmering in a gap of psyche heat. Thick waves batter with chrome as the filth multiplies, speed strikes, and vicious screams tangle with echoes, bring a modicum or mercy to your heaving mental state.
“Lesion Plea” sounds as manic and nerve-shredding as the bio information indicates, and honestly, that just makes the record even more volatile and combustible. Coffin Apartment feel as if they’re making a statement while hanging from a ledge over an unsurvivable fall, which makes the energy contained there that much sharper. This is a hell of a listen both musically and mentally, and it might be a good idea to have an a high ABV beer ready afterward so you can calm the fuck down.
For more on the band, go here: https://coffinapartment.bandcamp.com/
To buy the album, go here: https://coffinapartment.bandcamp.com/album/lesion-plea
Meat Mead Metal 