A Divine Proclamtion Of Finishing The Present Existence!!!
This record stands alongside Napalm Death’s Scum and a few others, as a life changing experience for me. Just as I thought I had heard it all, this epileptic seizure came along and pushed my concept of what is possible sonically, to a higher level. I will give the word to the user Noktorn on rateyourmusic.com, as he has summed up all the qualities of this lp far better than I ever could:
“And here… we… go.
If there was anything accessible about previous Last Days Of Humanity releases, it’s been violently stripped away here. This didn’t necessarily ‘invent’ gorenoise; the primordial workings of that style stretch back to the mid-’90s. But this and the new projects of Last Days Of Humanity members after that band’s dissolution absolutely canonized the basic elements of the style: insane speed, insane distortion, and almost nothing replicating actual ‘music’ as we know it. This is Last Days Of Humanity’s masterpiece, and it makes sense that the band broke up after its release; I mean, what the fuck would top this?
When examining this album, you can’t really critique it as you would anything in the typical extreme metal or goregrind field; that’s all piteously mainstream and gentle compared to this beast. What you’re in for is the most violent and extreme material of earlier Last Days Of Humanity taken to a wholly new level. The vocals don’t just roar, they scream from the very gut of Erwin De Groot, and they’d be horrible enough alone, but the band feels the need to process it through every level of pitch-shifting and distortion known to man, putting them out the other side of the mike as something almost unrecognizable as coming from a human throat.
Guitars? Are there guitars here, or just fifty distorted basses all playing something completely different? There’s no memorable riffs here; the distortion is so massive all you hear is a wash of insane, ultra-fast, occasionally undulating noise in the background to the point where the very idea of doing a cover of one of these songs is laughable. The riffs are so fast and probably so technical that they’re not even a melodic instrument anymore. You forget that guitars are supposed to play notes and chords and that sort of thing on this album. And the drums? Well, the drumming performance on this album might be the most extreme I’ve ever heard provided entirely by a human; it sounds completely untriggered and perhaps the most consistently fast and brutal performance I’ve ever heard not supplied by a machine. To say this album is one long blast beat punctuated by fills and the occasional pausing snare hit would be entirely accurate; the very fact that the drummer doesn’t pass out halfway through ‘A Divine Proclamation Of Finishing The Present Existence’ is a testament to human endurance.
You don’t listen to this album as much as you undergo it; the songs are almost randomly structured, with long strings of tremolo riffs and blasting suddenly stopping, two solitary snare hits echoing out of the speakers before the band dives back into the madness, not even giving the listener a chance to collect his or her (but really, his) thoughts before erupting into another insane blast of noise. Despite how crazy and seemingly improvised this music is, you can tell it’s very carefully structured: everything seems to be perfectly on time, the sudden rhythms stops and starts are very precise, with single chiming ride cymbal strikes and suddenly muted chords coming out just too perfectly to be on the fly. Because of this, it might be one of goregrind’s most complex releases; hell, I can barely call it goregrind or gorenoise since this sort of thing really seems more the purview of John Zorn than anyone in a Gut t-shirt.
This is of course barely music; I mean, occasionally a track will come around like ‘The Beauty Of Perfection In Sensible Cruelty’ which seems to hearken back to ‘The Sound Of Rancid Juices Sloshing Around Your Coffin’, but I don’t think that will comfort those bearing all the other tracks, which are nothing more than maelstroms of complete blood-drenched chaos. That being said, there’s clearly a method to the madness; you almost wonder WHY this music is so careful and precise given its nature- I mean, would anyone notice the difference? Perhaps not, but therein lies the genius: the complete nerve and single-mindedness and terrifying certainty it takes to make ‘music’ like this is a representation of what extreme music SHOULD be: wholly uncompromising, entirely insane, and very far beyond anything we’d call ‘human’.”
(from http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/last_days_of_humanity/putrefaction_in_progress/)
http://www.discogs.com/Last-Days-Of-Humanity-Putrefaction-in-Progress/release/6797398
