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Deviated Instinct: Guttural breath

22/02/11  ||  Khlysty

Don’t know ‘bout you, but I have a strong affinity towards all things punk/hardcore/crust/d-beat, what with me being an old fart and having misspent me youth listening to such titans as Amebix, Discharge, Charged GBH, Exploited, Fear et al. Well, even though I have a pretty decent collection of such music, it was thanx to DaveDeath, our trusted forumer from the land Down Under, that I came by Deviated Instinct and their 1989 piéce-de-résistance, the infamous “Guttural Breath” L.P. Lemme tell ya, folks, one listen and I was instantly hooked.

So much so, actually, that I toyed with the idea of including “Guttural Breath” to the House of the Holy of GD, the Class6(66) section. In the end, though, I thought better of it and decided to give those guys a simpler and more to the point review, instead of trying to break down to elemental pieces their exceedingly aggro take on crust. See, a lot of people consider Deviated Instinct to be one of the first crust/death metal crossover bands and listening to “Guttural Breath” it’s easy to see why: the band doesn’t follow the trusted and true m.o. of most punk bands; that is, playing everything in speed-of-light blurs, but goes for a rhythmic pattern that would have the discerning listener name-checking bands like Celtic Frost and early Sodom and stone-age death metallers as main influences.

The general way the songs in “Guttural Breath” develop is this: they start in a slow, quasi-military way and then they branch out into faster and faster sections, sometimes sounding like your basic d-beat, some others approaching even blasts, before going into chugging codas. It’s obvious that the three members of the band tried to use whatever musical ideas they had developed until that point to make the songs as complex as possible, without sacrificing the basic aggression and immediacy of punk. The riffing is quite simple, based on barre chords, but it’s obvious that the – then – three members of Deviated Instinct tried to explore some ideas that came from the further reaches of thrash and the then-nascent death metal and include them into their music. So, instead of the basic super-aggro, super-fast m.o. of punk, what we get here is a music that seems, at the same time, as in-your-face as possible and pretty complex in its composition and arrangement.

Of course, for all its sui generis styling and intricacy, “Guttural Breath” is still a punk record and, as such, contains all the pros and cons of the genre. On the problem side, the raspy vocals become pretty soon unappealing and the production seriously lacks heft and presence, making the songs sound less violent and immediate than they might in, say, a live setting. Another thing that seems to me as a drawback is that, for all the complexity the band tries to apply to its songwriting, the songs after a while seem to become too same-y, following the same patterns and blurring into each other. Anyway, all in all, “Guttural Breath” is, IMO, a record that represents punk’s early forays into extreme metal stylings and, as such, even if not essential, is a pretty interesting listen.

7,5

  • Tracklist
  • 01. The resurrection encore
  • 02. Void
  • 03. Beyond pain
  • 04. Dripfeeder
  • 05. Molten tears
  • 06. Domino syndrome
  • 07. Aqualung
  • 08. Delirium carnival
  • 09. (Behind) the scaffold

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