EXPLOITING DYSFUNCTION

Many years ago, I was told that Cephalic Carnage was the heaviest band on mother earth. It has taken me until this week to get hold of this album though. Call me "slow on the uptake".

Cephalic Carnage does grindcore.... but not straight forward grindcore like Napalm Death, Rot and Nasum. Cephalic Carnage includes a lot of other elements into their music. Jazz, avant-garde, sludge core and most other atonal music. Their sound is still very heavy and impossible to penetrate for most people. But there is intelligent life beyond the tonnes of bricks they throw at you. There is almost too much intelligent life because I sometimes long for more grind core and less avant-garde in their music. When Cephalic Carnage blast at 200 miles an hour, they are really brutal. The same goes for the more slower death metal parts. Those parts are actually very good.

My gripes with this album is more with the avant-garde pling plong parts which I feel is too drawn out and meaningless. But Cephalic Carnage and probably all their albums can still be regarded as intelligent grindcore. For that reason, I really like this album. I think the band is onto something here and their inclusion in ProgArchives is deserved. I will keep an eye out for this band. Is Cephalic Carnage the heaviest band in the world ? Maybe......

3 stars

"Exploiting Dysfunction" is the 2nd full-length studio album by US experimental grindcore/ death metal act Cephalic Carnage. The album was released through Relapse Records in April 2000. The display will tell you that the album contains 66 tracks but most are silent second long tracks and there are in reality "only" 15 tracks on the 57:55 minutes long album.

The music on the album is rooted in grindcore but there are also a large portion of death metal/deathcore elements on the album. It´s all delivered with twisted riffs, odd experimental ideas, and loaded with a schizophrenic arsenal of different extreme metal vocal styles. There are both juicy deep growls, higher pitched aggressive type vocals and just about everything in between. The band are very skilled and succeed in making all their crazy ideas work pretty well. The sound production could have been slightly better, but it´s still of a pretty good quality. "Exploiting Dysfunction" features both shorter bursts of grindcore and longer more experimental tracks. The longest and most experimental/progressive track on the album is the closing 15:25 minute long title track. While the track ends with about 7 minutes of feedback and noisy experimentation, the first 7 to 8 minutes of the track really display the diversity of Cephalic Carnage´s music and their adventurous approach to songwriting. That´s also apparent in the shorter tracks though.

"Exploiting Dysfunction" is probably not the kind of album that pleases more traditional grindcore fans or death metal fans for that matter, but if you enjoy weird experiements, crazy technical playing, and a generally adventurous approach to writing extreme metal, "Exploiting Dysfunction" might turn out to be your poison. Personally my patience is tested more than once during the playing time, yet it´s impossible for me not to acknowledge the intense passion of the delivery, and the adventurous approach to songwriting and a 3.5 star (70%) rating isn´t all wrong.