No other genre carries the singular weight that mathcore does. I’m hard-pressed to ever think of another style of music that so fluidly manages to meld deft, technical, engaging musicianship with such raw emotions. Of course, there are more emotional genres, and more technically impressive ones, but mathcore perfectly fuses these two qualities into a sound that channels nuclear levels of anger and pain, while remaining consistently interesting to listen to from a technical perspective.
It’s also a genre known for its, shall we say, lack of subtlety: mathcore is in your face, cranked up to 11, ready to throw down whenever and wherever. Any time a clean section appears in a mathcore song, you can bet your sweet buns that the only reason it’s there is to make whatever’s coming next hit even harder. There’s rarely any deeper meaning or theory-related reasons behind a riff, and just as often as not, sections are barely more than open-string chugs interspersed with the occasional panic chord (minor second interval).
Slamming brutal death metal is, without a doubt, pretty similar to mathcore in its straightforward nature. Certainly, it shares the same focus on simplicity, and even though it typically lacks mathcore’s level of technicality, most bands make up for this with a great level of song-building chops and riff-writing knowhow.
So, of course, it was only a matter of time until someone put two and two together and created a bizarre mathcore/slam hybrid. Ian Wilmot, friend of Heavy Blog and bassist of Carthage and Waking The Monolith (and one time guest writer for the site), teamed up with Jason Holmes of Bong Rips For Jesus to bring about Embodiment Of Onslaught, a project that mixes together elements of mathcore with slam to create something brings the best of both genres to the table.
Across the eight-minute runtime of this debut EP, the duo absolutely crushes everything in their path with an unstoppable assault. Never before has a band name been more accurate: truly, The Age of Infertility is the embodiment of onslaught, an incarnation of total aural warfare at the hands of this pair of musicians. Constantly pushing forward, there’s never a dull moment here; the band is always on the move from riff to riff, from breakdown to jaw-smashing breakdown. Everything is appropriately produced for the genre – meaty, cavernous, and organic – and each track offers up a new helping of stupidly heavy riffs.
In The Age of Infertility are some of the angriest songs I’ve ever heard. Equal parts Disentombed and Ion Dissonance, these eight minutes will leave any fan of heavy music hungering for more. If you’re into either genre, you’d be remiss to not give this a spin.