Zom – Flesh Assimilation
Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!! Ever just want to do that? Ever just want to scream the scream of sacrilegious pleasure when you come across something so absolutely filthy, so disgustingly, awfully corrupt it defines your entire existence as a thing of the soil? You worm, do you not know of Zom? Zom come from Ireland and their sound is pure anti-matter, a warped swirl of chaos that devours whole planets. Though previously somewhat aware of their work through a few tracks, this was the first time we actually sat down to listen to one of their releases front to back, after receiving the promo package from Invictus Productions. Sometimes you never know what you’re going to find in these promos, and Zom isn’t too keen on explaining themselves, either. All of their albums are covered in esoteric, mechanical art with a wiry logo, and here it is again, part of some horrid machine coming from the clouds to implode a planet in on itself with the burst of sickening sound you’ll find listening to Flesh Assimilation. Watch as your body is consumed by the anti-matter created by Zom, let the dirtiness shower you in blasphemy.
Flesh Assimilation introduces you to pure sonic finality, the end of all life through sound. The tracks are interspersed with what can best be described as technology dying, including an intro segment of bit demons and wailing emoticons in some charnel house of antiquated machinery. Automatons come to life, their gears shrieking from overused, ancient oil, which Zom replaces with via lubrication from fresh blood. They lumber forward, twitching into action, forming into a gigantic swell of metal that begins to hover with the power an anticipation for cosmic destruction. It wavers above you, opening a giant maw of broken, mechanical parts as a giant beam of discord careens down into your body, and you realize we just spent a paragraph trying to put the art into words.
Part of the reason for that was so we could get below the damn thing, God damn it Zom, because as you can see the cover is longer than it is wide, which leaves us no space above for a proper embedding of the music before the second paragraph, which is what we like. Curse you, Zom, we’ll just let that go, because Flesh Assimilation is awesome. After the brief cacophony at the start that sets the stage almost as good as we did, Zom deals out their mantra: rotten, harsh chords, battering drums, and some of the Goddamn most abhorrent vocals known to man. That’s one of the real kickers to this one, the lyrical delivery, which echoes out of the ground with a sound somewhere between black, thrash, and death. Their solos, if they can be called that, are completely ugly, lost in pure decay. Occasionally you’ll hear a further development of sounds similar to those in the intro, that is when Zom isn’t spending their time crushing in your head because there’s is little break to be had in this one, it completely envelops and doesn’t even give itself a chance to say it’s sorry. They have an excellent sound that captures what this kind of music sounded like decades before it was shoegazed all over, and their unique presence through imagery creates an excellent package. We noticed this album got a bit of hate for what should be all the right reasons for its existence, which is entirely contradictory. Listen, if you’re picking up something like Flesh Assimilation, you know as soon as it starts it needs to be ugly, and if it isn’t ugly and you don’t have a problem with that, there’s something seriously wrong with you even medication will never erase.
Written by Stanley Stepanic
Zom – Flesh Assimilation
Invictus Productions
4.5 / 5
