Hissing - Permanent Destitution

Hissing have been developing a reputation for noisy, harsh, thrilling death metal within the underground and building quite the anticipation for their debut LP. And here it is, Permanent Destitution, a short, but dense and intriguingly dynamic album that has definitely made good on the implicit promises the band had made. An abyssal blizzard full of nihilistic black metal-tinged death metal arranged in a ceaselessly transforming fashion, Hissing’s debut lives up to its underground hype and does well to set itself apart from the rest of the crop.

The opening track, “Backwards Descent”, sets the album’s tone immediately with thunderous tom-driven and blast-beat drumming, hazy cacophonies of dissonant guitar distortion, and rumbling growls that all swirl around in noisy anarchy. Yet the band still feel very much in control, incorporating an effective and sinister guitar riff near the beginning of the song. And the album really doesn’t divert too far away from this established footing in chaotic, abysmal death metal; the second track, “Pablum Abundance”, continues the pattern of downward-spiraling tremolo picking and all-over-the-place trajectories, working in its own unique musical ideas that still manage to give the song a sense of identity.

The album moves into the third song, “Eulogy in Squalor”, which of course continues Hissing’s ferocious assault, but brings in some notably tasty interplay between the rumbling distorted bass lines, down-tuned guitar grooves, and the black-metal-inspired dissonant riffing. I’m reminded a bit of Portal’s maddened album from earlier in the year, as well as Leviathan’s recent output, with Hissing exercising their dynamic talents to a pretty impressive degree on this cut. A howling wind carries the album into its fourth song, “It Without More”, which features a more satanic-black-metal-inspired approach to the guitar parts and more prominent double-bass drumming, but of course, the band never stay in one place for too long, jumping around from section to chaotic section.

In its faster moments, “Cascading Failures” leans even heavier on the blast beats, seven-string grooves, and ride cymbal drumming, very much in the vein of Leviathan. But the song spends a good deal of its time marching through a slower, doom-inspired fog of distortion. The song “Perdurance” rounds the album off on its longest piece, which transitions from rumbling drum fill, to andante guitar riff, to frightful echoed wails of torment, ultimately closing the album’s final minutes with a fittingly unsettling, repetitious, industrially noisy drone.

At first glance, there really isn’t all that much special about Permanent Destitution; in fact its similarities to the work of artists like Leviathan, Portal, Primitive Man, and others is not really hidden well, if at all. But what makes this album’s abyss worth peering deeper into is what Hissing does with all those similar elements. Rarely are the band to be found coasting on this record, and they handle well musical chaos they stir up, making several smooth transitions per track through all the perceived disorder. Rather than lingering on and only making adjustments to a few motifs over the course of a song, Hissing are constantly switching up and introducing wildly different ideas from what they start with. This is quite the debut for Hissing, and one that hopefully prepares the path for more to come.