The Most Exquisite Agonies

Oh man, this is one chaotic album! This is what it would sound like if Incarrion and Incestuous had a big, ugly Colombian baby. You will not make much sense of this album at all. Technical death metal riffs going in every different directions, stopping and starting and spinning round like some fucking crazy fairground ride while the drums do everything they can to make sense of what is going on and follow suit. The vocals of course don't follow any sort of pattern and merely grunt and gurgle over everything whenever they pleasel, and the bass adds a second layer of melody (like you might find in Leishmaniasis first album) although pushed quite far into the background.

I just can't get over the chaos of this, there must be a million riffs on this album and the drummer never seems to play any fucking pattern whatsoever. It's surprising as fuck how he manages to keep up half the time, and the whole thing has a really great rehearsal-style rawness to it. Infact, it sounds as though the guitarist wrote the whole album one night, and the band decided to practice the drums by having him play the full album while the drummer tries to see what fits. Then they realised they were recording the whole time and just thought "fuck it, let's release it like that!" It's totally nonlinear music, you will not hear any one part repeated twice, yet you won't be able to tell the parts apart individually anyway due to them all being defined by how chaotic they all are. Then there are these tiny spastic solos everywhere, about ten thousand pinch harmonics per track, tons of really technical sweep picking and...jesus christ, it's just fantastic.

This is what defines death metal for me. It's like a really, really drunken night out - you don't really remember anything after it, all you know is that it was incredible and you want to go and do it again. If you dig Chaotic Matrix and Garavito´s Pedophilia Tales as much as I do them this album is quite simply a must. Oh yeah, and wouldn't you know it, but the totally incomprehensible lyrics are really well thought out criticisms of the human race, albeit delivered in imperfect English. Seriously, go look 'em up and prepare to be impressed. Pretty much the perfect death metal album.

Got to see the band years ago along with other great death metal bands. This one struck me the most however; they were really the only band that showcased so much technicality. Mauricio’s guitar skills really blew me away.

What makes ‘The Most Exquisite Agonies’ so outstanding is how they keep it brutal and balance it with technicality. They’re one of the best I’ve heard that can do this without sounding like a failure. Out of all the great underground death metal acts from Colombia, this one manages to even deliver amazing guitar solos as seen on “Butchery's Fields (Let The Bastards Kill Themselves)”, “The Humanity's Fall, and my favorite “Immersed In Chaos”. Everyone that’s familiar with the underground should know these bands usually lack solos. They also tend to stay away from the groovy slam sessions and I consider it a big plus. Mindly Rotten also has highly competent drumming. Blast beats here are ridiculously precise and they don’t sound sloppy whatsoever like say Amputated Genital’s Human Meat Gluttony. They’re incredibly fast; they almost sound like nonstop gravity blast beats but not quite.

It is so important to mention that the band is so professional at what they do. The thing that usually frustrates me the most from Colombian bands is their fucking grammar errors. Well, don’t expect that from the boys of Mindly Rotten. I haven’t spotted any grammar mistake on their title names or in their lyrics; it makes Colombia look good. Vocals here are delivered without mercy. The dual of vocals between the guitar and bass players were recorded in a fantastical manner. They outdo a lot of Colombian bands in my opinion and I’m pretty sure no one will disagree.

Keep in mind that this is their debut. I can see this band going places and taking death metal to a whole new different level. I can easily recommend this to Origin fans, old Cryptopsy fans and Internal Suffering fans.

It's known by everyone the excellent scene of brutal death localized in Colombia. It's not easy for the bands there to surpass the brutality standards, established by classic ultrasick bands like Internal Suffering, Purulent… The technical trio of MINDLY ROTTEN leaves a new mark to match by genre acolytes: The Most Exquisite Agonies is half an hour in hell, half an hour with your head into a hole full of hungry vermins that cut your flesh and devour your eyes and tear your tongue apart while you madly try to go out, to later get inside you and continue the feast with your guts.

This work is absolutely rentless.''Grind Blasting Chaotic Metal''can be read on the artwork, and it's quite an accurate description. To make yourself an idea, take any other album from the Colombian scene, shake it and put the tempo faster. You'll have a good approximation of what The Most Exquisite Agonies is. Drums throw intermittent blast beats, so there's almost no continuous rhythm anytime. Bass and guitar riff so (apparently) chaotic lines all over the neck that the structure of the each track blurs and your ears go numb like after having a massage by Mike Tyson. Vocals are shared by bass and guitar players, being maybe the weakest part of the album since none has a really impressing tone, but they're capable of growling enough gutturals over the instruments to dress the massacre of your hearing organs. Production is the typical in theses situations, a bit dirty and overdriven but not so much like some years ago, when this was the norm.

The brutality coming from Colombia rarely disappoint. MINDLY ROTTEN not only do not disappoint, they beat you up sonically and then walk over your agonizing body like a hurricane. If you like Brodequin, Pustulated or any other Colombian band, get this now.

(Originally written for and published on www.pitchline-zine.com)

If you cross the two main styles of Colombian death metal: that of filthy slam like Carnivore Diprosopus and ultra-technical, violent brutal death metal like Internal Suffering, you'd get something like Mindly Rotten's 'The Most Exquisite Agonies'. The result of such a perverted blend is an album that's as spastic and wild as it is filthy and ultra-distorted. It's the auditory equivalent of an attack by killer hobo with a butcher knife in his hand and no food in his belly for three days. It's ugly, fast, demented, painful, and very short.

The short running time (just over twenty five minutes) is in this case a blessing, though, because I doubt that anyone could handle much more than that of this sort of death metal. Mindly Rotten remind me a lot of stalwarts Malignancy, playing a similar style of constantly changing, furious death/grind with a small army of pinch harmonics dotting constantly throughout the album's abrasive riffing. Calling this 'technical' is both accurate and a misnomer at the same time: there's a huge array of notes being played blindingly fast at all times, with no riff or rhythm seeming to last more than a few seconds before being kicked and the head in favor of yet another weird change. Each member of the three-piece is extremely dexterous with his instrument of choice, but seems remarkably amateurish as well, as although every member can play incredibly fast and technically, they also seem barely able to keep in time with one another, transforming pieces that could at a lower tempo be called 'songs' into blurring attacks of frantic, grinding noise.

Wet, slurring vocals in the vein of Terminally Your Aborted Ghost with the addition of a more conventional growling style eject passages of strangely thoughtful and philosophical lyrics, which seem to revolve around nihilism and rejection of societal standards as their main theme. In conjunction with the ultra-misanthropic lyrics is a similarly misanthropic style of songwriting, which always features a constantly blasting drum performance which explodes into abrupt, tactless fills alongside a nervous, jittering guitar which alternates between foaming, top fret tremolo riffing interspersed with ever present pinch harmonics, awkwardly shuffling chugs (which last for all of two seconds before a new tremolo riff comes in), and completely irrationally placed Slayeresque solos that take a rusty hacksaw to even the most remote idea of melody. There is no groove anywhere. There is nothing you can headbang to, not merely because it's such violently arrhythmic music, but also because it never dips below 'jesus fuck' as the primary choice of tempo.

I was able to find precisely one point on 'The Most Exquisite Agonies' where I was able to find an actual time signature that I could count out with reasonable accuracy. The rest seems to be a neverending blur of furious intensity. It's only now, after reading the lyrics, listening to it a few times in a row, and really getting the feel of this album that I truly 'get it'. This isn't a normal brutal death metal album; it's an art piece about the insanity and chaos of modern existence. Mindly Rotten achieves a sort of feeling that most black metal bands only dream of emulating: that of feral barbarism in the face of a world that seeks to tame all wild things. It is a mandatory listen for those who think that metal today is now safe and toeing the line of mainstream convention. It is a masterpiece of modern death/grind that should be heard by all who see themselves as a serious member of the metal scene. The words of the band themselves say it best though, truly embodying the primal spirit of death metal, on 'The Humanity's Fall':

"To escape from this obvious false world
I won't get involved in its endless circle"