Mutual Hostility "Inhuman Anguish" (Review)

Mutual Hostility “Inhuman Anguish”

2023 Lethal Scissor Records / CD

www.lethalscissor.com

BADASS SONG TITLES: Black Vault, Faces in the Walls

BADASS TRACKS: Every. Single. Fucking. One. All killer, no filler.

Mutual Hostility is a band born of death metal pedigree, with Dan Gates (previously of Ohio wimp-smashers Ton, and also having served time in Fully Consumed, as well as currently performing in 72 Legions) on guitars and bass, and a couple of badasses I’m not as familiar with, Eric Frabotta and Adam Rogers, who handle drums and vocals respectively, who appear to have been in Stresslord (which is a band whose name I recognize but I have not heard).

Mutual Hostility is musical fuckin’ C4. I’m pretty sure they picked the cover art to explain what’s going to happen to your feeble metalized ass when you begin your journey through the record – it’s gonna leave your brains on the goddamn walls and just smash that gray matter to bits. This is real death metal for real death metalists, and fuck you forever if you can’t hang with it. Every song is unique, every song is well-written and memorable and distinguishable, and the recording itself doesn’t have the over-digitized sterile and cold feel of a lot of nowadays death metal records. There’s feeling underneath the brutality, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for about 90 percent of the brutal bands today.

If I have to describe it stylistically, it reminds me of the essence of the Florida or New York greats with Gates’ signature riffing style (often swirling and turning faster than you can wrap your head around what just happened). A heavy-ass drum sound pins down the time perfectly, and absolutely ferocious (and understandable) rhythmically focused vocals anchor it all. Tie all of that together with actual good songwriting, memorable riffs, and a thorough understanding of what they’re good at as a band, and you have a brutal death metal record that doesn’t waste time taking prisoners – it executes its captives instead. There’s no let-up in its intensity and no mercy in its heaviness. Even the intro and outro aren’t wasted space, since even those have value musically here, and aren’t just some stupid-ass horror movie slop tossed on the record (and honestly, if you’re not Mortician, please fucking stop). Mutual Hostility smokes most of what’s selling on the big labels today, period. Your popular slam bands, deathcore, and “look-what-I-can-do” tech-death can all go get fucked, because this record annihilates them all.

I’m not going to pick the album apart by song because there is no weakness to be found here. I don’t need to tell this band that anything sucks, because nothing on this album does. It reminds me of when I started buying death metal records in the first place in the 1990s and I was getting thoroughly destroyed by records again and again. I got that feeling again with this album, which doesn’t happen often. That level of excitement, when I hear a record, is rare and I do not mention it lightly.  Maybe a handful of records each year give me that goosebumps-on-the-arms feeling, since most records are just fair-to-good, and in the end are nothing truly special. This album is that sort of special, however, and I’ll be spinning it over and over again.