Dispossessed: Visceral, Vital, Aboriginal
Death metal, be it from snow blasted Stockholm or the heat haze of Tampa, is a powerful outlet and redemptive force for the intense frustrations of the young - yet the genre is sometimes sullied by bullshit lyrics about Satan and gore that have long since ceased to shock, and now take on the aspect of pantomime. Not so with Sydney band Dispossessed. Their anger is genuine. It lends weight to a hybrid sound that already stands alone in its fusion of moods and textures.
If you’re after pristine triggered double kick that sounds like a typewriter, you won’t find it here. Eerie passages abound, dripping in doom and then erupting and unfurling like coiled snakes, cut through with staccato blasts that punctuate loping passages thicker than soup.
With vocals spat both in English and the Gumbaynggirr dialect, their lyrics rail vehemently against the twin tyrants - colonialism and capitalism - with an urgency that owes more to hardcore and a trebly bite redolent of black metal than it does death metal’s more stylised tech. Flirtations with post rock and shoegaze ride in on reverb drenched clean tones. Song structures are fluid and there is space and tension built between peaks and explosions that speak of songs jammed into life.
If metal is very much the blues music of white middle class suburban males, then in Dispossessed we have a whole other animal. Visceral. Vital. Aboriginal.
Debut album Insurgency is available now.
