Album Review : Liquid Shit - Repulsive Bodies (2023)
Liquid Shit is the worst name you can give a band if you ever want to be taken seriously. No disrespect to its members, but it comes across as either a joke or a feces-themed goregrind band. But it's not. In all transparency, since Vox & Hops's metal architect Jerry Monk handed me the bandcamp link to their new EP Repulsive Bodies like a vial of cocaine in our group chat in April, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Today, I want to tell you about how great this band is despite their unfortunate choice of name.
Repulsive Bodies is a six songs EP of the most powerful and harrowing sludge metal you've ever heard. Seriously, this band is so mean and nasty, were Romans to have iPods back in the days, they would've listened to Liquid Shit while crucifying Jesus. The opener Anxious Wretch is immediately demands your attention with the intentionally overblown guitar production and the marching riff reminiscent of Godflesh's glory days. The half-growled, half-snarled vocals give it a unique and dangerous texture too.
But Anxious Wretch is about the only song on Repulsive Bodies that can be tied to anything recognizable. What's so amazing about this record is that it deconstruct itself from song to song. The follow-up Encrusted in Eschar is structured around this super fuzzy and groovy riff, but it constantly explodes into choppy verses where the frontman (a man simply named G) rasps and howls for his dear life. It's both empowering and terrifying at the same time, like you’re being transformed into a super predator.
On Untethered , the riffs start going in every directions. It also goes completely silent when the vocalist sings his verses, like it was another voice competing for dominance in the song. This song is so drenched in fuzz, you can hear static whenever the bassist plays any note. I love things that are excessive and Repulsive Bodies indulges in every possible form of violence and hostility one can inflict on a listener’s eardrum while still projecting this aura of crushing power, like Godzilla laying waste to a large city.
Repulsive Bodies takes a more abstract and atonal (and awesome) turn on the fourth song Foul Occurence, where the instruments are so meshed together in the mix, it's almost impossible to distinguish what's the guitar and what’s the bass. It’s how one big percussive monster creeping inside your brain to assault you. There's little to no structure whatsoever. It's a big "fuck you” to how you’re supposed to make music. Technique is eschewed for emotional effect and virulent power and that bet is fucking successful.
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The spiral into madness continues on Mentally Dissected, which sounds like nothing else that I know. There’s a thin guitar riff that gets immediately swallowed by the band's furious rhythm section that marches forward with the predatory grimness of a demented Black Sabbath song. It’s slow and nasty and full of pain. It also makes a great use of feedback as an audio weapon even by sludge metal standards, which are pretty fucking high. Liquid Shit are elite eardrum aggressors even in a genre full of them.
Bound Forever To This Body is, of course, the most demented thing on this record. It's only logical given the downward spiral structure of Repulsive Bodies. It's so distorted and atonal, it almost sounds like a power electronics song? The sample at the start, the almost spoken word vocal performance and the cacophonic and absurd mix leads me to think it was an inspiration for this song. But it is even a song? I’m not sur it even qualifies. Bound Forever To This Body is three minutes of searing pain in its purest expression.
Repulsive Bodies is a hostile record, but it is in the best possible way. It communicates a desperate violence with such unfiltered purity that it's difficult not get amped up and pissed off while listening to it. Your worst instincts and your most painful wounds will emerge while listening to it and I’m glad a record has the potency to do this. Traveling to such depths of inner darkness in a controlled twenty-three minutes setting is something that definitely should exist and that definitely should be more celebrated.
