Beats and yelling: Dipygus’s psalms to marginalised life forms

Dipygus
Out 22nd January on Memento Mori / Crypt of the Wizard

Belated self-titled albums are often indicative of a system reset. Dipygus are well established by this point. Active since 2013 and now three albums deep, what could this late coming eponymous full length signal? Dipygus may not be the most striking or obvious habitat for evolutionary death metal, their style resting comfortably on a surrealist recapitulation of early Autopsy, but there’s something left of centre about their chosen subject matter that catches the eye, and by extension the music they leverage to communicate this.

The philosophy of death metal can take many forms. Mortality being perhaps the largest conceptual canvas one could possibly work with, it’s no surprise that as death metal approaches its fortieth birthday, its treatment of death has explored every level and epoch of intellectual, theological, and spiritual discourse on the matter.

Seen from this angle, at first glance Dipygus are hardly bringing anything new to the table. But that’s precisely the point, they ask us to look again. These tracks are not primarily about death, they are about deviation. They speak of life at the borders of humanity, something that looks like us, is governed by the same DNA, but partakes in acts that break the last taboos of civilisation. Or else they are mutated to such an extreme that we expel them from the realm of creatures that warrant respect as rational animals.

This is a celebration of marginalised life. Or rather, a way to test the limits of the claim that all life is sacred. It has precedents. Blood and Nuclear Death proudly revelled in their psalms to biology’s unfortunate tangents, too ugly, inherently violent, or otherwise discordant to normal species functioning, and therefore undeserving of anything but repulsion. But here Dipygus marry this wanton surrealism with the sophisticated architecture of more considered death metal.

The result is an oddly conflicted experience. On the one hand it obeys the metrics of chromatic, dirge driven death metal in its acknowledgement that life is governed by the one absolute certainty that it will end. But on the other hand, Dipygus do not poke and probe this idea from every conceivable angle as more traditional death metal is wont to do. Instead they veer around the fact. Not through squeamishness mind. But because their interests lie elsewhere, namely a bacchanalian dedication to the phenomenon of life, all life, however putrid, repulsive, or otherwise offensive to modern sensibilities.

In one sense then, this is a piece of social commentary. A provocation to civilised society, illuminating its contradictions. But it plays out in a more uncanny and indeed abstract fashion at the level of the music. The guitar tone is soft, inviting, fertile, the distortion is restrained for the sake of allowing a rich organicism to bleed through each chord. Ditto the drums, as they undulate between bursts of disordered energy into slow crawls of strained purpose. Vocals froth beneath this textural offering, imbuing all with the terrifying possibility of an underlying consciousness.  

The actual riffs pivot on a form of energetic death doom that feels familiar, but the extent of the illogical chromatic tangents, the tension achieved through repetitive cycles accented by gradualist layers of noise, disorientating lead guitar licks that interject from nowhere only to fold back into the ooze, all lends credence to the perception of the familiar made strange, mutated, morphed almost beyond recognition.

But the album is not entirely lawless. Themes are articulated and settled on, and still hold a great deal of sway over the overall flow of the music, from the soaring guitar leads to individual drum patterns. But their importance is relegated to a background role, merely interjected with broad directional material, lacking specificity. 

Given that this is the most developed, idiosyncratic, and fully realised iteration of the Dipygus vision, the rationale behind making this a self-titled album seems fully justified. A manifesto on how to make death metal weird to the point of abrasion, yet still draw clear and coherent connections with the tradition that it builds upon. It is recognisably the latest in a long and proud lineage within the genre, but one that teases, pushes, plugs holes in the boundaries of the form almost to breaking point, resulting in an unsettling, cloying world of phantasms.