Acausal Intrusion — Vomit Meditations

Chaotic frenzy is the name of the game for Acausal Intrusion's fourth full-length, Vomit Meditations. Although touted as "tech-death," the duo feels closer to "avant-death," being a bit more free wheeling and improvisational. This style certainly helps add to the chaotic nature of the album, bringing the darkened madness to the fore, challenging the listener at every turn. However, this feels a bit double edged, and what are the album's strong suits are also its weaknesses, not pushing strongly enough in any direction for its shots to land firmly into their targets, leaving the album feeling meandering and unfinished.

Behind the dark and enigmatic cover by Daniele Valeriani, Acausal Intrusion's Vomit Meditations hammers the listener with blackened, chaotic death metal blasted forth by the duo of Nythroth and Cave Ritual. Dizzying riffs, pounding rhythms, and guttural incantations come together to form the profane meditations, like vile, sonic rituals beckoning forth the denizens from a sinister dimension. Using dissonance and varied, unpredictable structures, the tracks on the album scream like a Lovecraftian nightmare, devoid of shape or reason, but rife with darkness and horror. And about half of the time, this works very well for the band, the duo coming together to open these otherworldly gates. However, the other half doesn't quite line up, and what would be a haunting ritual ends up being disorganised and somewhat messy. Nothingness' recent Godslaughter showed a band that used dark, dissonant chaos to form something techy and engaging (in a roundabout way), but Vomit Meditations feels like it needed a bit more time to form. The ideas are there, but the duo doesn't always seem to be playing the same song, and for many of the tracks, this goes on for eight or more minutes. Again, there are times when the two are in unison, fighting for the cause, but it isn't enough to carry the album, and it ends up feeling just like a sum of its parts.

Vomit Meditations is an interesting, almost a "free'" death metal album that uses chaos and fervour to pummel out its message. There are some solid elements at play here, and with a better structure or even a little more time with the ideas as they are could have given this album a stronger presence. However, as released, the tracks miss more than they hit, making already long songs into laborious chores. There are some nuggets of brilliance here, it's just not really worth the effort to dig through the disarray to find 'em.