Record(s) o’ the Month – January 2025

By Angry Metal Guy

The tradition at Angry Metal Guy has been the strong start to the year where, like so many people with New Year’s Resolutions, you stick with ’em for a while, and then they taper off, sliding later and later as the year goes on. But this year, even the dopamine kick of listing everything in some kind of ranking order and getting lots of positive feedback from readers didn’t help me shake my funk. Alas, that means that I got way behind, and no one was available to pick up my slack. I apologize. However, since I am breaking the trend this year, maybe that means that 2025 will be significantly different!1 So, here’s your R(s)otM for January. It’s a beautiful time to be alive, my friends.2

Mutagenic Host // The Diseased Machine [January 3rd, 2025 | Gurgling Gore | Dry Cough | Memento Mori | Bandcamp] — The death metal newcomers in Mutagenic Host are already impressing with their brand of old school-inflected, death metal-fueled technological cynicism. With such timely, relevant themes for this nightmare fueled hellscape that we’re living in as the backdrop to the rifftacular and muscular tuneage contained on The Diseased Machine—out January 3rd, 2025, from a melange of labels [buy it here on Bandcamp!]—the whole package dropkicks the listener from the opening strains to the final moments and has entranced the staff of Angry Metal Guy (as well as a-me, Angry Metal Guy). As the recently demoted n00b Tyme opined in his review:3 “Mutagenic Host has released a death metal album that checks all the boxes, a rifferously frenzied affair of epic proportions. It will not be the only thing I recommend in 2025, but it’s undoubtedly the first. I will be intently eyeing Mutagenic Host, anticipating their next evolution, and fans of this style should, too.” Set up those Google alerts, folks!

Runner(s) up

The Halo Effect // March of the Unheard [January 10th, 2025 | Nuclear Blast | LOL, you want to own lossless digital files? No chance of that, loser!] — You can’t imagine that I moved to Gothenburg only to not begin shilling for everything that comes from this beautiful city. Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s actually a requirement of being Swedish that you shill for your home territory.4 Some things—like the In Flames discography following Colony—make the task of shilling hard; March of the Unheard makes it easy.

As a fan of the Gothenburg sound embodied in the conjoining of Dark Tranquillity and In Flames that builds the root of The Halo Effect’s sound, this is a delicious meal loaded with everything you need in a melodeath record. Add to that that Mikael Stanne is one of the best vocalists in metal whose performance raises the level of the record at every turn, and you’ve got yourself a Record o’ the Month. Fellow old Steel Druhm was equally impressed, if in his particularly understated way: “You can appreciate March of the Unheard as a lost Dark Tranquillity album or as a slick homage to a specific moment in metal history, and it works well both ways. This is a superior album to Days of the Lost with a much greater replay potential, and I’ve been surprised by how vital and fresh it is. Not bad for a bunch of olde dawgs retreading their own ancient stomping grounds. Here’s to the olden ways in these confusing modern days.”

Faithxtractor // Loathing and the Noose [January 10th, 2025 | Redefining Darkness Records | Bandcamp] — Faithxtractor—the band with the worst name since Fvneraryy Fvnkk—has returned with Loathing and the Noose, an ambitious evolution of their old-school death metal sound. Building on their 2023 record Contempt for a Failed Dimension, these Ohio death metallers have upped their game by fusing blackened thrash, melodeath, and bedeathened doom into a relentless (yet surprisingly dynamic!) assault. Faithxtractor balances brutality with surprising melody, innovating without losing their edge. And one guy—our very own Maddog, who I was shocked and a little disappointed to learn is both quite sane and human—sees this as the proof that they are carving out a place for themselves in the modern death metal landscape. He proselytized (more or less) pithily: “Faithxtractor makes it work by whole-assing their every move. Loathing and the Noose’s gargantuan death metal riffs, smooth songwriting, and excellence throughout its genre romp won me over.”

#2025 #Faithxtractor #Jan25 #LoathingAndTheNoose #MarchOfTheUnheard #MutagenicHost #RecordSOTheMonth #RecordsOfTheMonth #TheDiseasedMachine #TheHaloEffect

Mutagenic Host – The Diseased Machine Review

By Tyme

Cooked up like the T-Virus in some underground UK lab and now stalking the streets of London, is Mutagenic Host, a newcomer to the British death metal scene. After the release of The Genotoxic Demo in 2023, Mutagenic Host signed on with Dry Cough Records, as well as Gurgling Gore and Memento Mori, to release their debut album, The Diseased Machine. Primarily concerned with the world’s increasing levels of apathetic complacency and the rampant proliferation of AI, “their work is an allegory for the systematic industrialization of humanity’s eradication—whether by human hands or by the machines we create to snuff out life.” In a genre packed with competition, Mutagenic Host steps up to the line, prepared to toss their fedoras into the ring alongside fellow new British heavies like Coffin Mulch, Slimelord, and Mortuary Spawn. I wondered if they’d have the DNA necessary to stand out in the crowd or if they should keep percolating in the petri dish.

Mutagenic Host‘s primary organism is a mass of old-school death metal, with hardcore elements pustulating its writhing appendages. More Obituary than Monstrosity, the death of The Diseased Machine‘s metal harkens back to the halcyon days of Florida’s nineties scene. Rife with tight, precise riffs but trading in the thrashier influences for sprinkles of hardcore, Mutagenic Host manages to set themselves apart from their British brethren. Whether they’re crushing skulls with Unleashed abandon (“Genestealer,” “Promethean Dusk”) or dragging their knuckles through chug-a-sludge swamps of Wharflurchian slime (“Organometallic Assimilation,” “The Twisted Helix”), the unrelenting riff-slaught of Jack Thompson and Sami Tuohino1 packs The Diseased Machine with enough globby chugs, oozy leads, and twisty solos to reduce even the meanest Resident Evil end boss to a purulent puddle. Combine that with Dan Bulford’s bulbously punchy bass work and George Kinsella-Pearn’s world-beating drumstrosities, and you have one devastatingly lethal mutant on your hands.

Completing the vehicle through which Mutagenic Host brings you their post-apocalyptic vision are the vocals of Ash Moore. His Maulti-pronged attack comes with the standard weaponry of guttural grunts, throat-ripping roars and raspy shrieks, but floats in a reagent of hardcore-tinged shouts. Moore’s performance, recorded with cavernous echo, sits siloed in Ben Jones’ beefily brutal mix. This bifurcation enhances rather than detracts from The Diseased Machine‘s gene-splicing approach, which opener “Neurological Necrosis” fully encapsulates. After a brief eighties-style science fiction intro, the track builds with slimy guitar licks and bubbling bass lines before spewing forth with Moore’s mighty roar over a brain-bashing brutal riff. The song weaves through hardcore laden d-beats, and gang shouts before lumbering to its conclusion under massively thick riffs that stick like slow-churned pus-butter. And despite its state of youthful embryogenesis, Mutagenic Host presents as a band much more mature, The Diseased Machine sounding like a product from well-established scene veterans.

Weighted neither to its front nor back half, The Diseased Machine is a balanced platter of gurgling goodness, nearly void of anomalous flaws. Deft injections of groove and melody give the tornadic guitar swirls of “Artificial Harvest of the Obscene” and the bludgeoning bass of “Incomprehensible Methods of Slaughter” extra depth, ensuring not a second of The Diseased Machine‘s ideal forty-one-minute run time is wasted. Even the mid-album interlude “DIRECTIVE:: [kill_on_sight]” furthers the narrative effectively and offers a point of poignant respite. This break is needed to make it to the instrumental closer “Rivers of Grief,” with its Holst-inspired riff on the “Mars” theme to start; it gives way to a river of brutal chugs on which listeners float to the album’s conclusion.

Even before my most recent demotion to staff, I had been eyeing The Diseased Machine, so I was exuberant when I saw it glimmering in the sump pit, unclaimed by senior staff. I could only hope the album lived up to my enthusiastic expectations, which it does. Mutagenic Host has released a death metal album that checks all the boxes, a rifferously frenzied affair of epic proportions. It will not be the only thing I recommend in 2025, but it’s undoubtedly the first. I will be intently eyeing Mutagenic Host, anticipating their next evolution, and fans of this style should, too.

Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Labels: Gurgling Gore | Dry Cough | Memento Mori
Website: mutagenichost.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: January 3rd, 2025

#2025 #40 #CoffinMulch #DeathMetal #DryCoughRecords #EnglishMetal #GurglingGoreRecords #Jan3 #MementoMoriRecords #MutagenicHost #Obituary #Review #Reviews #TheDiseasedMachine #Wharflurch