Innumerable Forms - Punishment in Flesh

One of Profound Lore’s many great releases this year, Punishment in Flesh is Innumerable Forms’ debut record and one that I had been eagerly anticipating since hearing the first dose of it earlier this year (I don’t remember exactly when, everything is a blur to me). Blending cavernous death metal and doom metal in a sludgy stew quite reminiscent of Primitive Man’s Caustic from last year, Innumerable Forms keep the pace a little faster and the compositions generally tighter, clocking in at 38 minutes (about half the time Caustic took up). And while Caustic did thrive on its indulgence in lingering in a swamp of nihilistic and sardonic, slow-paced death metal, the dynamic of Punishment in Flesh certainly makes for an interesting and thrilling take on this slow-burning form of death metal.
Punishment in Flesh is packed full of grizzly, down-tuned guitar grooves and slow apocalyptic riffs, but the band know when to up the tempo and when to bring it back down. The vocals on the album, especially on the closing track, remind me a bit of those on the most recent Portal album (Ion). The band generally follow pretty straightforward structures for each song, not the basic verse-chorus form, but the motifs in each song seem to follow a pretty consistently logical order, often with the band starting slow, basking in a bath of intense guitar distortion and low, howling growls, and upping the tempo with some quicker, more mid-paced drumming. There’s rarely anything resembling a blast beat at death metal’s traditionally rapid-fire rate, but Punishment in Fleshisn’t really about going as fast as possible. It’s about the dark, foreboding atmosphere it creates and the few effective riffs it uses to do so. Even though it is only 38 minutes, it feels like just the right amount of time for the ideas they brin to the table and the pace at which they execute them. And given that they do up the tempo more frequently than Primitive Man did on Caustic, and integrate fewer abrasive noise sections, it makes sense that it would wind up a bit shorter.
It’s a solid album and one that definitely met the hopeful expectations I had for it. I’m looking forward to what the band have planned for the future. I hope that Innumerable Forms maybe don’t try to simply follow Primitive Man down the dangerously depressive and nihilistic tunnel they’ve chosen to dig, and hopefully Innumerable Forms finds their own unique ways to enhance their sound to be able to put out massive projects like Caustic.

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