I blame my fellow scribes for my newfound love for Deathcore. They all listen to it… a lot… and share songs… a lot. So it’s only natural that it would start rubbing off on me, plus attending recent Deathcore shows by Distant, Ingested, and Carnifex has made me appreciate the sub-genre more.

Dead and Dripping is the lovechild of one Evan Daniele from New Jersey. This is actually his fourth full-length album, following Blackened Cerebral Rifts (I reviewed that album here if you care to read it) and I don’t know what happened between that album and Nefarious Scintillations, but holy fucking shit this is a banger. I mean that sincerely, I like it better than the previous album, and I’m about to talk about it.

Straight away, I need to get the length of the song titles out of the way… they’re still ridiculously long. I reviewed a Black Metal album by Esoctrilihum, and the song titles on that were a full paragraph. It’s still a bit annoying, but it is what it is, and my griping about it isn’t going to change it.

“Nefariously Scintillating Through Vacant Galactic Reservoirs” starts off with some killer riffing and blasting drums, and the first thing I notice is a better production than Blackened Cerebral Rifts had. This shit is crisp as a fucking Dorito, the drums sound great and so do the other instruments, hell even Evan’s vocals got better. There’s pig squeals galore, and while it’s not Gutalax they’re still entertaining as fuck.

Another thing about Nefarious Scintillations is that the songs are slower, not by much; there’s still blasting, but it is reigned in and more precise, not everywhere and nowhere. “Horrifying Glimpses of Inconceivably Demented Cityscapes”, “Pestilent Hints of Darkened Malodorous Vibrations” pummel you with sledgehammer beats and huge pinched harmonies that hang in the air like blood spray. The latter has vocals so deep that they sound like they came from the dude’s bowels, and there’s a killer sparring between the guitars and drums around the 5:15 mark.

“Swollen Torsos Adorned with Pustulating Hexagonal Crania” pulses with a Carcass vibe, sort of Symphonies of Sickness, melded with Last Days of Humanity’s… anything really. This is the longest track on the album, and it uses every second of those nine minutes to have your ears torn off and the holes fucked raw.

Next up is “Sickeningly Vague Anatomical Silhouettes”, and it’s a knuckle dragger of a track with this brain-drilling riff that swirls and feeds back on itself. The drums are all over the place on this one, scattered blasting, mixed with enough rolls and fills to give you sea sickness. “Spontaneous Recollections of Unwitnessable Atrocity” is a more “traditional” Death Metal song. The structure is there to put you in traction.

“Seeping Through Ancient Transdimensional Corridors” has some Morbid Angel feeling guitars, sort of Formulas Fatal to the Flesh skronkiness near the end. Album closer “An Utterly Tenantless World of Aeons-Long Death” shreds its way across a soundscape of dirty riffs scattered above the crashing drums and bass.

I can feel confident in saying that Nefarious Scintillations is a solid Deathcore album. Everything sounds phenomenal, and this is a way better album than Blackened Cerebral Rifts in so many ways. If you like the bands I’ve mentioned, in addition to Pig Destroyer, Putrid Pile, and the mighty Internal Bleeding. Then you should grab this badass motherfucker. Blow your fucking speakers with this one!

I digress however and move to the matter of why I’m here today and that is to tell you about Dead and Dripping and their family-friendly album Blackened Cerebral Rifts, a nine-track banger, literally. It is… before I go further, I should confess that I have a passing love for Deathcore, at best. My fellow writers love it, Lorna Shore is an altar we here at Teeth of the Divine worship at, I love some Putrid Pile, Whitechapel and Thy Art is Murder and that’s kind of it. But I’m always looking for new ways to damage my hearing so I picked this one to see what I’m missing out on.

Well, it isn’t really fun to listen to I’ll get that out of the way. I like to think that I’ve heard it all, but apparently not because Dead and Dripping are the aural equivalent of being ripped apart by a chimpanzee; I’ve never experienced it for myself, but I saw pictures of the lady that did get attacked by one and GODDAMN! Anyway, you may or may not see where I’m going with this but I’m struggling to be nice and not having much luck with it.

“Tragic Ascent of Absurdity’s Pale Moon” starts off fun enough, a bit of blasting a bit of thrashing and then something happens that I wasn’t expecting… it gets annoying. Fast. I think this might be the first album where I looked to see if the song was over, that happens with the unnecessarily long “Infinitely Plummeting into Violet Portals of Delusion”, when the songs on the album just sort of flounder like fish out of water it doesn’t help things to have a song that long. I’m not saying that Dead and Dripping aren’t good musicians, they have two other full-length albums that you could check out if you wanted to. I don’t have a favorite song on Blackened Cerebral Riffs, well I guess “Hopeless Desire for Reprieve” but only because it’s 2.31 minutes short and it’s an instrumental.

So, I’m sorry, not sorry; I just don’t like this. Like I said before, maybe it’s because I’m getting older; whatever the case it just isn’t my bag of rice. It’s not that Dead and Dripping are horrible musicians, they know how to play their instruments, but this album makes me want to punch babies. For those who like this sort of thing, according to the promo blurb, you’ll eat this up if you like: Wormed, Demilich, Suffocation(?) and Defeated Sanity. Buy it if you like it.