MUTAGENIC HOST – The Diseased Machine

vote
6.5

• Bands:
  MUTAGENIC HOST
• Duration: 00:41:06
• Available from: 01/03/2025
• Label:

• Dry Cough

• Gurgling Gore

• Memento Mori

Two years after “The Genotoxic Demo”, Mutagenic Host are back with “The Diseased Machine”, their first full-length which consolidates their name within that hotbed of young British bands intent on keeping the flag high of the most concrete and free-range death metal.
Musicians who are not interested in reworking the plots of the genre with the occult and smoky attitude of neighbors like Grave Miasma and Lvcifyre, opting instead for a fat, linear and no-frills cut that cannot help but betray a certain hardcore and thrash metal, which is then poured into a series of riffs and solutions designed to trigger a physical response from the listener.
Licensed by a small coalition of underground labels, made up of Memento Mori, Gurgling Gore and Dry Cough, the album therefore becomes the spokesperson for an apparently simple and obvious proposal, but which in reality – to be truly effective and not go round in vain on itself – necessarily requires an appropriate understanding of the dynamics, a sense of groove that is not limited to hitting but to building, innervating the songs with that tension indispensable for the maximum performance of the breakdowns and subsequent restarts.
Fortunately, the London band seems to have grasped and internalized all of this properly, already proving superior to the aggressive but naive Celestial Sanctuary and becoming the protagonist of a tracklist in which Obituary (especially the drier and more street-oriented ones of works like “World Demise” and “Back from the Dead”), early Dying Fetus and All Out War act as the main tutelary deities of the narrative, whose development, however ignorant and pachydermal, soon reveals a careful construction and a verve that prevents the songs from becoming tedium.
Ours are obviously not death metal geniuses, but they know how to stack the riffs and give their music a fluid and vital pace, drawing a sneer of approval right from the opener “Neurological Necrosis” and insisting on the same line for the next forty minutes of the album, an almost perfect soundtrack for a day that started off badly or for a training session in the gym.
Even the sci-fi component, evoked both by the artwork and by the samples scattered here and there, proves not to be totally botched or 'thrown there', coloring the listening experience and managing (at times) to achieve a curious depth in the midst of many beatings, as also demonstrated by the epic-cinematic ending of “Rivers of Grief”, an instrumental that seals “The Diseased…” in a not too distant climate of post-apocalyptic decadence from that of Fear Factory in the nineties.
For those who prefer mosh to blast-beats, or for those who don't care too much about the distinctions between old-school and modern in the vast world of death metal, the experience will probably be worth the time invested.