Rank and Vile Will Redistribute Your Flesh
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Deathgrind. The very name strikes fear and confusion into the hearts of all those uninitiated and unwitting souls who have yet to fathom its prodigious intensity. Born from the union of grindcore’s insane speed and death metal’s beefy technicality, the style pushes at the outer limits of chaos and brutality within extreme music.
Those who decide to take this volatile combination even further unearth something truly inhuman. Unsurprisingly, such forbidden territory has just been breached by a recently-formed outfit known as Rank and Vile, a name that grows more and more clever each time you read it. Hailing from Portland, the four-piece outfit has stretched and contorted its scathing brand of deathgrind into impossible new shapes with the addition of brutal downtempo slams and old-school murkiness into their sound, resulting in material that will simultaneously break your neck and compress your mind. Check out an exclusive stream of “redistribution of flesh” below.
Stripping away all but the most vital elements of these stitched-together genres, Rank and Vile leave nothing but a grisly, slowly liquefying skeleton whose joints grind together torturously, whose bare limbs smash against dungeon walls in hellish agony. Taking a straightforward approach to deathgrind – a death metal compositional style with the ravenous intensity of grindcore – and infusing it with something even heavier, their music returns to the primal source from which the most brutal forms of punk and metal spring forth. Approaching the release of their debut album redistribution of flesh, the eponymous track is a tour-de-force of primordial virtuosity and pummeling might. Stream it exclusively below.
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Perhaps the greatest evidence for Rank and Vile’s pronouncedly tongue-in-cheek attitude is offered within the track’s brief introduction, a sound byte sampled from PC gaming classic Diablo I. A nostalgically low-tech demon voice utters the short phrase “mmm, fresh meat” before we are launched into a breathless vortex of viscous fretwork and encrusted yowls. The song presents an uncanny aural re-creation of the sensation of flesh being torn from bone, especially after a last-second tempo change launches the track into an early 1990s-style, pit-stomping breakdown punctuated by a crisp ride cymbal and a spiraling tower of chugged riffage.
Darting through densely composed instrumental motifs, “redistribution of flesh” seeps and evolves into different shapes quickly and with lithe ability often unseen in deathgrind, following the lodestar of classic death metal despite their convincing grindcore disguise.
Despite the brutalist, Neanderthal musical and aesthetic approach Rank and Vile has so plainly laid out, this sliver of the album in fact conceals highly specific and meaningful social implications. In the band’s own words, “redistribution of flesh started as a joke, but the more we thought about it the more it sounded like just the kind of song we wanted to write. Wealth inequality is a bigger issue today than at any point in human history; millions of people are exploited every day, trapped in horrific cycles of monotony to line the pockets of a select few.” Infusing their compositions with a timeless cultural message, Rank and Vile give a wise nod to the punk origins that have doubtlessly influenced their diverse sound. With the Pacific Northwest churning out some of this year’s most putrid and ferocious extreme metal releases, it comes as no surprise that Rank and Vile has risen to the challenge to showcase their talents.
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redistribution of flesh releases October 18th. Pre-order on Bandcamp.
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