Contaminated – Final Man (Big Hulking Beast Metal)

I’ve been listening to this one way  too much. So much that I’ve been trying to convince the band to do a special, limited-run tape and shirt combo, but to no avail. Their powers are too great to accept my grovelling as worthy enough to be printed onto glorious celluloid music strips. But that’s okay I can still listen to this anyway, just not through my stupid tape player. That makes me sad, but yet it adds to the experience of listening to Final Man, a gasping death metal breath of a tired genre. For you, typical death metal fans, are but a slowly degrading hulk, a mass of stagnancy that skirts evolution while only falling apart. Few see the signs. Those who do are too optimistic, or unable to bear the weight of death metal’s downfall. We here bear the weight readily, and the power of bands like Contaminated enable the process of acceptance more invigorating. Bring about the end please.

  

I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of these Australian charred death beasts before, because I’ve had a thing for blackened death metal for awhile now. It just wants to push the typical death metal listener away, and that’s good, because I can’t listen to something if too many people already do. Most death metal is so stuck in the past. When any movement in anything is reaching a point of “it’s all been done,” you tend to see decline represented before the final collapse. Some have referred to such periods as periods of “decadence.” Death metal has always indulged that, of course, so the idea here is a bit different. Plus, metal fans are too dedicated to allow full collapse of any genre with metal in it, but thankfully for the smarter ones out of us, bands like Contaminated are here to redefine by destroying a genre musically, in this case death metal. Final Man is nearly a final form of death metal, but the sound is so utterly devolved it can do nothing to the listener but raise them from out the sticky pit of adages that death metal has become. Contaminated have no part in this traditional sound, they play in a style crude, with a refined, discernible edge, shattered and jagged from the drums, which have a sound almost unaligned with the main drive, until they’re hammer into scraps, and then become a torrent. At times it sounds like the drummer is about to collapse in the middle of playing, but then the music slows and gives him a second to breathe. There is something of a gaping hole that this one sucks you into, the echo of the vocals, like some prehistoric predator, pushing you further downward. Put this one on repeat, it does not tire at all.

Contaminated Official Facebook

Written by Stanley Stepanic

Contaminated: Final Man
Blood Harvest Records
4.4 / 5