Primitive Man And Hell Bash In Your Deepest Defenses With Vicious New Doom/Sludge Split

Primitive Man and Hell’s vicious new extreme metal split thrashes violently to the point of feeling like it shreds the listener’s insides and sends them prowling like a vicious wild animal. The three songs — including two from Denver’s Primitive Man and one from Oregon’s Hell — beat whoever or whatever is unfortunate enough to stand in their way senseless and feel like they offer an at least temporary answer to the question of just how sonically violent we can get and how we can get there. The record flies past the point of simply pumping up the listener, however — by the time the close of the last track rolls around, it’s clear that this music itself is a vicious beast intent on domination.

The bands have brought our deeply rooted, even violent anger to life as much as might ever be possible and forced us to stare it right in the eyes in all its hideous glory — and that’s not an experience one walks away from unscathed, even if it does transpire only in between your ears (unless you’re at a concert). Your inner demons are awake now — and you can’t exactly easily dismiss that as a metaphor while under the weight of Primitive Man and Hell’s physically ferocious music.

Some people spend so much time worrying about a hell in an afterlife that they completely ignore the ramifications of their own minds conceiving of and grasping onto this concept of eternal torment in the first place. They push themselves through their lives like a meandering shopper in a grocery store until one day, something rushes them and knocks them off their feet. The new Primitive Man/Hell split accomplishes that and then some — you can not walk away from an immersion in this chaotically bubbling stew of madness without waking up inside, at least for a moment.

What’s all the more remarkable is that there’s no tryhard stench around this release. Both bands sound like rather than trying to hit a mark someone else set at some other point, they’re relentlessly pushing themselves to go deeper into the hole they see something promising and perhaps — hopefully — satisfying at the end of.

5/5 Stars

Listen to a single via Spotify. The EP releases February 22 via Translation Loss Records