The 2015 Arsies: January 22, 2015

January 22, 2015

One of the best things to have happened to the music industry in recent years is that we have collectively started to throw off the yoke of Life According To CD. To put a finer point on it: albums no longer have 74 minutes as a goal, thankfully. Tonight, we listen to two albums that clock in at 74 minutes combined. Love it.
Sludgey doom hipsters Bastard Feast snatch the coin and run with it. Osculum Infame, their second release, is just about as much fun as blackened doomcore should allowably be. And yet, the band also stretch their legs a wee bit, on tracks like Watchful Defiler and The Serpent Spoke. But otherwise, you've got in Osculum Infame a half hour of reliable blast beat tinnitus. It sounds like Bastard Feast have two devils sitting on their shoulders, Sludge and Grindcore, and the poor bastards listen to one in turns.
No strangers to blast beats, Origin return fire with Omnipresent. From the opening track All Things Dead all the way through to The Indiscriminate, you have a very different flavor of hot sauce here, with a sharper, more precise bite. But there's also more variation in the music throughout the album. On the subject of ferociousness, both bands deliver in slightly different ways. But with just about every meaningful metric that Bastard Feast can boast about, Origin does it better.
Tomorrow morning, we'll have a slightly longer contest, between Job For A Cowboy and Wo Fat.