Fawn Limbs – Their Holes Aroused by the Splinters Carved from Their Teeth
Band: Fawn Limbs
Title: Their Holes Aroused by the Splinters Carved from Their Teeth
Label: Sludgelord Records
Release Date: December 6th
Country: USA
Format Reviewed: Digital Stream
I can remember around 2002 discovering this crazily intense Southern Metal band called SOILENT GREEN and their album “A Deleted Symphony for the Beaten Down”. I was all into PANTERA and hungrily searching for heavier and still heavier riffs. But at the time, SOILENT GREEN proved just a bit too crazy for me. Sure the riffs were heavy – extremely heavy in fact – but my brain couldn’t process all the sudden switches and changes, from one savage riff to the next, tempo changes, stop and starts, I couldn’t keep up. Nearly 20 years on and I get SOILENT GREEN, I get NAPALM DEATH, I get DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN.
So I think to myself, “yeah, I can handle extreme metal”, but times move on, and though these bands are no less heavy now, there’s a whole new landscape of intensity being explored that I have to now try to wrap my brain around. It’s a landscape that bands like CARBOMB are exploring, with their unfathomable time sequences and what would seem like utterly chaotic carnage if it wasn’t so obviously meticulously mapped out. Frenetic blast-beats, warped guitar-riffs, bizarre textures, screaming, it’s like you can throw anything in the blender and a perfectly crafted, monstrous whirlwind will burst out. And who else is there to take you on a terrifyingly, helter skelter auditory, rampage? Well there’s Pennsylvania’s FAWN LIMBS for one. Having already released the cacophonous “Harm Remissions” full-length, the band has wasted no time in releasing the follow up EP “Their Holes Aroused by the Splinter Carved From Their Teeth”.
With six tracks clocking in at just over 8 minutes, this might seem like a brief interlude, but make no mistake, these are 8 minutes you’ll be spending with your ears and brain sucked into an utterly disorienting vortex of auditory carnage. Actually that’s not strictly true, 7 minutes really, as opening track “Reverberated” lulls the listener with a sparse, spooky, guitar picking intro, over some eerie distortion before the band, well… drops 10 tons of electronic machinery on your head.
From there on in, there’s not much to do other than strap yourself in, while FAWN LIMBS attach a jet engine to your back and fire you off at speed through a dark landscape of breakneck, glitchy, riff-batteries, spliced with weird, creepy, twanging guitar interludes as in the middle of “Atrocities” and the floating ambience of “Tetrahedron”, before final track “Extortion Parcel” explodes in your face like a thousand melevolent techno metal spiders.
So I lied again. It isn’t really 7 minutes of carnage either. The carnage comes and goes, but the disorientation is constant. There are so many cool ideas, riffs, tones and textures, both battering and lulling, it’s like the band took a 25 minute recording and went “ok, let’s squeeze this down to 8 minutes. Jam it all in together as tight as you can”. No doubt, there’s some kind of Jazz element influencing this music, but this is not for chilled out, smoky bars, this shit is intense and there’s no time for settling in.
My psychologist mother once told me that conditioning is most effective when the recipient doesn’t know what to expect. You can squirt a cat with water every time it enters your garden to take a shit on your lawn, but if you want to really mess with its head, just squirt the water most of the time. That cat will be constantly on edge. Well with FAWN LIMBS the sudden attacks can come at any moment, so you better be ready to run. 8/10 Tom Boatman
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8/10 To Greatness and glory!
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