Album Review: The Capsule by Necro Deathmort

The hugely prolific Necro Deathmort make a return with an album that sees the ball on their genre-straddling roulette wheel land on “Early 80s Horror Sci-Fi Flick”. Whilst the duo of Matthew Rozeik and AJ Cookson tend to occupy the somewhat barren electronic hinterland of metal, The Capsule finds them floating, capsule bound in space, with nothing but synths and electronic atmospherics for company…or so they might think. There are no guitars here – it would seem that in space, no one can hear you strum.

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Rocket Recordings have the commendable habit of releasing whatever product their signees see fit to submit, no matter how much of a radical departure, fruity experiment or utter anomaly that may turn out to be. See Salford’s Gnod, for instance, who’ve just followed an acclaimed 2014 psych-jazz triple LP with a paranoid three-track sludge record. Equally tough to pigeonhole are prolific London duo Necro Deathmort, such is their habit of veering from riff-ridden doom metal to sardonic industrial bangerz, embracing the notion that any legitimate cult band should be constantly confounding and confusing its own audience.

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To the extent that any Necro Deathmort release arrives a little pre-scripted – with a moniker such as theirs you know you’re not in for a summery pop workout – the London duo’s inky-fingered, bats-under-the-nightdress electronica feels curiously introverted on The Capsule. Positioned somewhere between 90s industrial and retro-future soundtrack, eschewing beats and guitars for waves of frigid synth and mal-illuminated contours (“We wanted this record to have a cryptic, alien quality,” confirms co-conspirator Matthew Rozeik), the eight tracks present create a tension that’s never fully exploited, each distended, portentous chord tending to work in isolation rather than reaching towards a climax. It’s a pity, because there are plenty of strong ideas in the mix – not to mention skeins of claustrophobic intent – but like a horror flick that looks good but never really scares, The Capsule remains a concept crying out for a narrative.

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The duo of AJ Cookson and Matthew Rozeik have been steadily firing out recordings since 2009, consistently wobbling between different shades of synth-driven darkness reflected in the unholy trinity of words for death that is their name. To date they’ve had a pretty open door policy to music making, marbling rugged beats, doom drone guitars, and the odd guttural scream into a propulsive blend of horror movie synth scores and industrial squall. Always prolific, 2014-2015 saw the duo producing at especially high speed, putting out untitled albums Volumes 1, 2, & 2.5, plus EP1, EP2, & EP3, as well as their most beat-heavy trip to date Martian Cartography, sounding somewhere between a NIN remix album and some late-90s Warp records acid house.

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