FREELOADER: THE SERPENT & THE SIREN’S ORBITAL PSYCHOSIS
Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the latest from The Serpent & The Siren…
When Vince blurbed this Canadian band of bro-dudes about a year and a half ago, he neglected to mention vocalist Clint Homuth’s formidable burping ability. Any deathcore vocalist worth his weight in gorilla shit knows how to “bree-bree,” but on The Serpent & the Siren’s third EP, Orbital Psychosis, Homuth is in a class of his own. There’s no functional difference between his subsonic gutturals on “Vaporizing the Subspecies” and “The Xenophage” and proper, full-voiced belching. Make all the fun of him you want. Nobody is working harder to unearth the 10-year-old humor in death metal culture than The Serpent & the Siren.
The vocals aren’t the only aspects of Orbital Psychosis that sound inhuman. TS&TS’s chops are of the robo-virtuoso variety, which is to say that the gears on this machine turn quickly and frictionlessly. Riffs are blunt, clipped charges, leads do sparkly scales, and the plentiful breakdowns stutter in staccato chugs in lockstep with a chain-fed kickdrum.
There are whiffs of expansion since the band’s last EP, Posthuman, including the airy middle section of “Shroud of the Terraformer,” which finds Homuth trading in his eructations for a Cynic-style vocoder. It’s a pretty unexpected passage, and an important one for TS&TS, because it opens up their hermetic tightness for a brief minute. The remainder continues with the band’s Beneath the Massacre/Despised Icon stylings, splitting joint custody over Homuth between airtight death metal and spacious breakdowns. Not much in the way of personality, but as inflectionless deathcore goes, Orbital Psychosis is pretty state-of-the-art.
(three out of five horns)
-SR
