by Mick Reed (@thasoundblog)
Somewhere between Incantation and John Zorn lies the reverse-ventricled heart of Pyrrhon, an Eye of Sauron like chakra, a penetrating portal into the slowly dissolving corpus of a god found dead by her own hand. Pyrrhon peeled back the scales from the eyes of many metal critics and fans with their chaotic and ambitious 2017 LP, What Passes For Survival. That album had a rogue energy to it, combining NYC's all too segregated but parallel tracts of avant-garde noise and jazz, with the brutal technical prowess of Suffocation approached with the laboratory abandon of Cecil Taylor. Listening to it felt like a cursed canopic jar had been shattered on the ground of the New York stock exchange, allowing for some terrible truth to be laid bare in the den of the financial capital of the world, the blinding light of which caused many a class parasites to melt into puddles of grease and goo, suturing the imported carpets of their corporate offices with the staining grilse of greed and absent humanity. It was a revelatory experience, to say the least, one left unmatched by anything in the preceding years. Now we have its follow up, Abscess Time. How does it stack up to its veil-piercing predecessor?
The first thing that should strike the listener when hearing the opening and title track "Abscess Time" is the level of control that the band has come to exert over their compositions. Many of the tracks off of What Passes For Survival had a free-falling, ragged energy to them, that while intoxicating, could at times feel unforced. "Abscess Time" in contrast, like most of the album that bears its name, feels like the band dancing on the head of a needle. This deliberation and conscious resolve found here is exhibited powerfully on the seething and calculatingly malicious, Neurosis-esque nomad noir "The Cost Of Living," with its bloody grooves and sardonic circuitous chords, supporting the raw-throated gurgle of vocalist Doug Moore's rawr. A similarly impressive feat of contorted conquest can be found in the rolling tides of skronky death chords and free jazz back-flips on "Human Capital," a conflagration which gives way to a cathedral roofed, post-metal cavern, carved in homage to the ritualistic blood-letting required to satiate private methods of production. There are some moments of raw violence as well, like the grind-girded slam of "Teuchnikskreis" and the escalating, tattered, djent wielding pummel of "Cornered Animal." Abscess Time pries open a window into a world very much like our own. The only difference is that the world we are viewing has no delusions about the tremendous spiritual costs and human sacrifices required to keep the gory gears of its social and productive engines turning.
If what I've described here sounds familiar to longtime fans of Pyrrhon, that's because it is. However, the goal of Abscess Time isn't aimed at kicking against the boundaries of the existent heavy music scene, but rather to give better definition to those lines that have been previously drawn. I think it's clear that in refining rather than expanding their sound, Pyrrhon have given us a more precise picture of what they're capable of while bringing into sharper focus their critique of a world lubricated with the blood of millions and run by glib, smirking ghouls. One such element that jumped out at me while listening to this record was the astonishing quality of the songwriting, particularly the lyrics on the Gorguts-esque epic "Down At Liberty Ash," which confronts the myths of freedom through work in poetic verses that could have been lifted from a notebooks of John Steinbeck or Mark Twain in the way they illuminate the damning nature of poverty in this country. I will leave with a selected quote, the weight of which I hope you will not shrug off:
Down in Okie, the judge gave God a hand
Snatching up cons from jail for the plant
Where their work would make them free
From addiction, mincing chickens
On the state's dime, chained to the line, stricken
The work's grisly, but the profit's tidy
And they chose those mangled hands
Over prison