Prepare for an untimely and painful end…
Review by Jason Guest
Release date: 24 November 2014
ZOM are no technical band. Their instruments are not played. They’re bludgeoned. And whatever chaotic and criminal roar collapses out of this battered apparatus is brutally and callously bashed into malformed shapes that we listeners – or perhaps sufferers may be more apt – refer to as “tracks”. Flesh Assimilation, the first full length from ZOM, is not comprised of “songs”. This is not intelligent design. It is savagery embodied. It is unrestrained rage. It is ear-splitting, cranium-crushing destruction of the feebly fabricated myths that we hold on to oh-so-dearly for fear of falling foul of the mundane and the meaninglessness.
Black metal, death metal, doom metal, extreme metal in all their ugliness are ZOM’s for the taking and breaking. If they’re not tearing holes in the sky with ragged and ripping riffs or grinding the foundations beneath our feet with ruthlessly pummelling drums, they’re dragging the tempo down low to add to the devastation the kind of extra weight that would give even the doomest of doom bands the fear. Add to the mix ugly and unruly lead lines that carve their way into each track’s infected flesh and a monstrous vocal that echoes deep into the muck and murk, and the stench of hell gone bad is released into the already blighted air. Breathe it in and prepare for an untimely and painful end.
Dank, dark, and drenched in dread and despair, ZOM’s Demo MMXI (reviewed here) and 2013’s Multiversal Holocaust remain devastating slabs of black death destruction. Both gave the world fair warning of this Dublin trio of torment and terror. Three years in and their first full length is a raw, primitive, and uninhibited assault destined to make a significant mark on the pungent and fetid cadaver that is the underground. Not trimmed but torn back to the blooded core of all things extreme, Flesh Assimilation is fucking grotesque.
8 out of 10
Track listing:
- Tombs Of The Void
- Hordes From The Cursed Realms
- Gates To Beyond
- Conquest
- Illbeings Unspeak
- Daed Worlds
- The Depths
- Flesh Assimilation
