Mastiff – Deprecipice
Mastiff – Deprecipice
MNRK Heavy
Release Date: 22/03/2024
Running Time: 34:00
Review by Rory Bentley
8/10
Kingston-Upon-Hull Sludge bruisers Mastiff have been through some shit and they’re here to tell you about it. As the world tried to rush back to normality after Covid fucked up everyone’s shit, the boys in Mastiff were not so happy to pretend like everything was automatically fine. Grief and mental health problems lingered long after the world opened again, and “Deprecipice” is the harrowing, furious pipe bomb of Hardcore-tinged Sludge born from this anguish.
Before pushing play, I noticed that the band gets a helping hand from the sickos in Primitive Man on one of the songs, so I knew bleakness was very much on the cards, however this album is anything but a swampy, depressing dirge. As soon as ‘Bite Radius’ kicks in with a filthy slab of D-beat, it is clear that the band are not going down without a fight, gnashing and wailing with some adrenalized Hardcore designed to punch depression and grief square in the dick. Of course, this is the furthest thing from a happy record you’ll find this year, but pissed off and ready to kill you in the pit will make the record appeal to a wider range of heavy music enthusiasts than the audio equivalent of drowning in a tar pit. There’s bleakness but there’s bangers, essentially.
Case in point: the beatdown at the end of ‘Everything is Ending’ not only sounds like the song title’s claim, but you can easily imagine hitting the pit and doing some damage in the same way as you would at a Knocked Loose gig. Those wanting something a little darker are also catered for by the harrowing ‘Cut-Throat’ featuring the cavernous larynx and devastating malevolent riff work of Primitive Man. This is as much an unsettling noise experiment as it is a riff fest, sounding like an already devastating song is being played at the wrong RPM on a turntable. Glitchy and Industrial while drumming and riffing your face off, it acts as the perfect lead in to the appropriately titled ‘Skin-Stripper’ which exchanges crushing Doom for chaotic Converge meets Napalm Death warp-speed aggression. It’s a truly stomach churning one-two that is in no way mitigated by the feral attack of ‘Serrated’ which somehow ups the aggression to new levels of sonic depravity, aided by fellow UK Hardcore savages Burner.
If I’m being super picky a smidge more variety would see this score being bumped up to the top tier, though cuts like ‘Worship’ and ‘Pitiful’ are still ass-beating slabs of Crusty Hardcore despite their similarities to earlier tracks. Closing track ‘Thorn Trauma’ has a tinge of epic sounding Post-Metal and clearly shows the band have a broad palette to paint with should they choose to in future and makes me hungry for what they do next.
Overall this is an excellent record and Mastiff are one of the bands to watch when it comes to the future of the Extreme underground in the UK
TRACKLISTING:
01. Bite Radius
02. Everything is Ending
03. Void
04. Cut-Throat
05. Skin-Stripper
06. Serrated
07. Worship
08. Pitiful
09. The Shape
10. Thorn Trauma
LINE-UP:
Vocals – Jim Hodge
Guitar – James Andrew Lee
Guitar – Phil Johnson
Bass – Dan Dolby
Drums – Michael Shepherd
LINKS:
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