The Vomit Arsonist - An Occasion For Death

Winds, storms, autumn is all around, and such a weather, full of energy and destructive power, fills me with a mood for some protest. And of course, automatically, almost without any control, my mind starts to seek for a soundtrack to strengthen those feelings of mine, to add them some special flavor; my eyes being focused on a new CD which arrives from the house, no, wait, from a bastion of the most powerful acts that I've heard recently. Malignant records strikes back with an album of one of the most active names of highly praised US scene of power electronics. Hailing from Rhode Island, The Vomit Arsonist and its frontman Andrew Grant presents a solo record under the code name 'An Occasion for Death', and today is THAT special occasion for me to put my headphones and rape my mind with a portion of heavy machinery.

With a huge backpack of different collaboration releases and singles, both on tapes, vinyl and CDs, Andrew succeeds in generating lots of fresh ideas, which he spills constantly into the boiling cauldron of power electronics and death industrial genre. I am sure that even comrade Merzbow could have been proud of such a productive rate of different bullets that mister The Vomit Arsonist shoots from his machine gun of creativity. And as most of his previous releases, the one that I listen to today has its own colors and a story to enjoy, feeding my wild imagination with his visions of a modern world perversity.

I truly believe that basic human emotions are quite simple and straight. Love, hatred, anger, all of them have a background on the level of instinct while all poetic and sometimes complex descriptions are just a sort of a veil that we hide them behind, maybe in our desperate pursuit to humanize everything that we get in contact with. But in the case of 'An Occasion for Death', once again music becomes a trumpet of changes and rips off the cover of human self-deception to show brutal but honest truth - human existence is like some grand, absurd joke. While we live our lives day by day, doing the same shit, playing the same pathetic roles, but by the end leaving nothing behind, not even a single memory of a deed or a story to remember. Such a simple but yet strong idea, don't you think so? Is it important enough to concentrate on it?

Diving deep into the world of bass frequencies and distorted sound, the story opens wide on the highest levels of sensuality. As simple are the basic emotions, the simple is the music of Andrew Grant, but with all the simplicity it carries a huge impulse of energy, and I am sure that the energy has its source in the depth of his understanding of the subject. "Think God out of Existence" creates an atmosphere of a total desperation with its slowly moving waves of machinery hum where sampled words fall as heavy as melted metal drops. The head starts to wag on its own to the rhythm of the drum in the second track "At the Edge of Life, Everything Is an Occasion for Death" while the vocal session rips off all the protective layers of human sanity. In "Invita Minerva" the accent is made on more monotonous structures of mechanical distortion, but even when being slow and static, they still keep the strength combined with harsh vocals having an echo effect. Heavy drones float out of the speakers when "Black Bile" explodes all over the room with a wide atmosphere and martial or even a bit solemn drum beat. A full production factory noise is being generated through mechanisms of destruction; I am being captured by sharp pulsations and vibrations and the whole inner world is "Torn between Will and Desire". ?The Absurd? is back again with monotonous metal scrapping, drones and creams, evolving into the last track - tragic, discovering the darkest corners of human nature, almost catatonic. Consciousness awakes with a scream for freedom ?. And the scream fades away, because nothing withstands a pressure of life cycle, death erases all false efforts and frail desires.

If you are familiar with previous releases of the mastermind Andrew (at least his solo-releases), you will notice for sure that the spirit of 'An Occasion for Death' is pretty different. The sound becomes less brutal, but much more atmospheric and the whole act cannot be judged from the power electronics point of view only. I think that it is a truly positive point that shows a definite evolution of the project. I still feel that there are some mismatches and areas that can have a slightly different structure to transmit the idea of the album a little bit better, but those parts are on the level of final tuning and don't have too much effect on the whole material. Let's hope that modern society will supply enough themes for Andrew to explore and hit us with a hammer of his heavy music in the near future. Nov 18 2013