Author: Rok Klemše
Artist: Dickless Tracy
Label: On Parole Productions
Release: year_month
Runtime: 45:00
Rating: 4/5
Brežiške’s veterans of the Slovenian metal scene, Dickless Tracy, are proof of sheer perseverance, if nothing else. There were plenty of moments when the band consisted of nothing but the Cepanec brothers. Sixteen years of existence and only (!) a fourth studio album might seem like little, but between those four full-blooded records there’s a healthy pile of splits and demo recordings. Grind spirit, you know. On top of that, there have been hundreds of gigs at home and abroad since 1997, non-stop, and five years ago their first properly professional studio album, if I have to call it that, Halls of Sickness. After wandering the gloomy halls of sickness, Dickless Tracy now serve up eleven eruptions of death metal disgust on Paroxysm of Disgust.
Paroxym of Disgust is, on the one hand, the logical follow-up to Halls of Sickness – most of the album swims in the toxic waters of filthy, primitive, old-school-sounding death metal. On the other hand, the new record also reminds us of the band’s even filthier, grindier past: three classics, Revenants, Reincremation and The New Domination, have been re-recorded, and right alongside them marches the grind-heavy Boneyard by cult American band Impetigo. Even though the album mixes old and new, it doesn’t sound scattered, but fluid and coherent. The old tracks blend nicely with the new nastiness in their slightly refreshed form, and everything sounds, thanks to the most polished production they’ve had so far, almost too pretty for Dickless Tracy. But on the flip side, that makes the brutality and punch of both old and new material hit even harder, presenting Dickless Tracy in a pretty fresh and slightly different light from what we’re used to.
The foundation is still mostly slow-rolling death metal, with seemingly simple but effective riffing, Cep’s thundering growls, and punchy, lively drums that don’t rely on endlessly repeated patterns but are varied and offer more than you’d expect from death metal drumming. On top of that, almost every song has a soul of its own (even if rotten to the core), which saves an album with a hefty running time of forty-five minutes from sliding into monotony. Then there are the individual bits of songs that break up the monotony by themselves and surprise with moments we don’t exactly get from Dickless Tracy every day. Leading the way are the blasphemous shriek of Anathema (Possessed By Christ), which sounds like something Regan from The Exorcist would puke up and spit out, even more so the grooving finale of Through the Maze of Lust, the stomping in Virus (with the obligatory “UGH!” in the style of Tom Warrior), probably the album’s best track Realm of Fools with its black metal excursion, and the dissonant solo outro of Tomb of Doom right at the end of the record.
Paroxysm of Disgust is without a doubt Dickless Tracy’s most mature record, and despite a somewhat more polished sound, it still delivers what we expect most from the Brežiške four-piece: authentic death metal filth!
Lineup
Tomi Cepanec – vocals, guitar
Ivan Cepanec – drums
Andrej Šepec – guitar
Domen Majcen – bass
Production
Dickless Tracy / Nenad Čekrlić / Luka Božič
Tracklist
1. Revenants
2. Anathema (Possessed By Christ)
3. Through the Maze of Lust
4. Reincremation
5. Ever Haunting Presence
6. Beautiful Yet Deformed
7. Realm of Fools
8. Virus
9. Boneyard
10. The New Domination
11. Tomb of Doom
