PYRRHON – Exhaust

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7.5

• Band:
  PYRRHON
• Duration: 00:37:58
• Available from: 06/09/2024
• Label:

• Willowtip Records

After five full-lengths, several EPs and over fifteen years of career behind them, always in the name of noise and deconstruction, it would be absurd to expect a decline in the experimental vein from Pyrrhon, or any attempt to soften a proposal now known for its alienating, anxiety-inducing and unsupportive approach for the listener unaccustomed to sonic deliriums in the death/grind and post/sludge key.
Faithful to this apparently chaotic vision, but actually channeled into the flow of a writing in which nothing happens by chance or for the sake of enslaving some form of onanism, the New York group unexpectedly reappears on the scene with “Exhaust”, announcing it on the same day of its release (which took place last September 6th under the aegis of Willowtip), bypassing the 'regular' promotional logic and proving once again – once the 'play' button on the player has been pressed – an inspiration far from exhausting its creative drive, this time the result of some jam sessions in a cabin in the woods of Pennsylvania.
The rural setting in which the group decided to work on the songs, however, should not mislead: as it was for the content of the previous discographic chapters, the album's tracklist seems intent on painting with very acid colors the most oppressive and neurasthenic side of the Big Apple; a belly of steel, concrete, rust and smog in which the human being disappears becoming the gear of a repetitive and asphyxiating mechanism, of which the quartet – much more than other realities inflated by hype such as Imperial Triumphant and Folterkammer – authoritatively returns both the image and the functioning.
Compared to the monolith “Abscess Time” of 2020, perhaps precisely by virtue of the instinctive and collaborative nature of the songwriting, the mix of ideas underlying the work turns out to be more organic (drawing above all from the Gorguts of “Obscura”, from the Painkiller of John Zorn and Mick Harris and from the noise rock of the old Amphetamine Reptile catalog), for an overall experience that in its own way, despite the usual wall of disconnected rhythms, free jazz evolutions and guitar disharmonies, hits the target of gaining points in impact and fluidity, 'streamlining' (impossible without the quotation marks!) the lysergic structures on which our guys build their metropolitan nightmares.
A tour de force for the synapses – just think of the five, exhausting minutes of “Out of Gas” – in which, however, especially in the first part of the album, the ensemble allows itself a few moments of respite and pseudo-linearity, dusting off the musicians' purely death metal and grindcore background and the veracity that the latter, when they want, know how to embrace without distorting themselves.
A job as per tradition difficult, annoying, repulsive, but not for this without value or reasons of interest. Who wants, arm yourself with Xanax and try the challenge.