Feed Them Death Has Bitter Words "For Our Culpable Dead" (Early EP Stream)

Feeding cerebral and emotional concepts into the versatile engine of extreme metal can produce unusual results — under skilled hands, these musings can be sculpted into labyrinthine riffs and rhythms that highlight the key points better than words can. Feed Them Death asks a rhetorical question on their upcoming For Our Culpable Dead EP that requires about every metal genre in existence to properly consider: with a world on the edge of ruin, why, exactly, should we forgive the sins of the father — the “culpable dead” who’ve put things on this path?

Take a shot contemplating this yourself: we’re streaming the EP in full now.

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For Our Culpable Dead plays out like a journey into another plane of existence: a trip accompanied by steadily increasing chaos and mayhem. The opener “A Subjective Tragedy” is a slab of boisterous death/grind, but near the end brief dissonant electronic tinges appear — almost brief enough, really, to wonder if they were even there. That thought disappears as the title track gets underway, dialing up the grinding ferocity and marrying it to digitized howls. Just after the climactic midpoint of the song, we pass into that new reality: a land of harsh noise textures and dissonant piano chords that construct a leering parody of melody. It’s a startling transition, but that’s what makes experimental music like this so interesting: even without the full-band instrumentation that had been there seconds ago, the second act of the song is just as gripping, and integral to the whole.

“A Subjective Tragedy” wraps up the venture with a little from both worlds: chunky and enjoyable blasts, off-kilter progressions and grooves, but also bizarre synthesizer spikes and a brief venture into doom metal territory.

This is a complicated album, especially given its short track listing, and as much as it may seem haywire initially, the disparate genres and instrumentation end up meshing together into a strong thesis.

Project architect “Void” offers some thoughts on its creation:

The title of the new EP is “For our culpable dead”, firstly because we are progeny to all the generations past that are guilty for making us inherit a world where tragedy is incumbent for everyone.

These dead are not only somewhere back in our past, but also and especially here, walking among the living, culpable for perpetrating a reification of the abstract, guilty of commoditizing all their superficial needs, forever tending towards conformity and constantly yearning for approval.

The new material, both thematically and musically, is to be seen as a bridge to connect the previous full length “Panopticism: Belong / Be Lost”, with the third LP which will be released in spring 2021.

“Panopticism” was a sort of concept album based on writings of M. Foucault and especially those concerning madness, surveillance and isolation, be it by design as in imposed upon people by society, or intentional and so purveyed by some people as a scream for liberty and independence from the societal stream of uniformity.

For as dark as that album was, it allowed a level of hope to be seen, with the occasional light shining through the cracks, a redemption made possible by embracing the condition of being lost, of not belonging, of living insolently alone.

The new EP is bleak, hopeless and desperate. It tackles much of the same themes however from a different vantage point.

Borrowing from some writings of T. Adorno about the commoditization of art, and modern music in particular, it looks at the historical reasons as to why our culpable predecessors had sabotaged the cogwheels of history so that it could crush us all, leaving us a world where happiness will be not only always and forever unattainable, but pushed further away every time we experience the tragedy of coming to terms with our hopes for the future.

Musically, I feel that I have expanded on the experimental ethos of the previous album by placing a lot of alien elements more centrally into the mix and composition, and so you will hear a lot of Black Metal, Harsh Noise, Doom, Drone and even Hardcore Punk mixed with Death / Grind. The intention was to persevere with my mission of making fast music more dramatic.

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For Our Culpable Dead releases November 2nd via Brucia Records.

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