Instead, they cast notes that ascend and descend with rapid fluidity, and though these chords don’t feel as deep, while they’re still crushing, there’s a nimbleness here, a harmony that provokes and teeters above an abyss. A more sophisticated development occurring on “Cage Intimacy,” the lead single, which heralds a transition in songcraft from the band, relying instead on a guitar harmony that doesn’t fall into their tried reverb space.
#Insurmountable review full
This enduring commitment to challenging listeners through sheer overwhelming aesthetic capacity is still on full display throughout. A doomed and dying place, the place we inhabit and call home. Its haunting direction is not an attempt to defuse, it is purposeful, to immerse the listener in the world of Primitive Man. This undulating ambience, inclined to disturb, and provoke, is a perfect transition. This bombast serves as an underpinning for a careful study in ambience, “Boiled,” in which a well of murmuring amps flood a recess of negative space, whinnying and crackling, waiting to be filled. A partnership that breaks between channels towards the end, applying a prestige like prog sensibility.
Subverting this all is a stealthy groove that emerges halfway through, establishing every tremor emitted from guitar and bass alike as a syncopated terror. The band’s lapses of long walls of static and reverb feel louder than ever, not a single sound could even register as diminutive, everything has a cosmic mass to it, a faultless intensity and scope. It’s not just existential woe, or purposeless gory metal camp, it channels a relatable terror of our world. In that space, “This Life” sounds like literal hell, made worse by exactly how well communicated it is. But, through expert production and a careful exploration of space between channels, there’s a concerted effort to push listeners closer to the abyss at the heart of it all. Yet underneath it, something has changed.Īs Insurmountable opens, listeners are met with staggered, slicing drums over channels of reverb, mounting to a cataclysm of frontman Ethan Lee McCarthy’s now signature guttural roar on “This Life.” There’s no chance at the band threatening their sonic profile, which has taken so long to develop into a distinct sound. Insurmountable only continues that dialogue of oppression, excess, and ever-present terror they summoned before. Immersion felt like a tarot reading (or ouija board depending on your inclination) that had soured, but spoke an immutable truth that you might have found difficult to grapple with. Not because of the deluge of negative events that coincided with its own release, but rather because it ushered forth a pact of understanding between band and listener. It felt appropriately timed, given the circumstances of that year, but more importantly it provided a massive sense of catharsis. Primitive Man’s last offering, 2020’s bleak masterpiece Immersion, writhed with an abominable glee, a grim thesis on existence, career, art, and the world.
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