With recordings of Greek street protests setting off the heavy riff like smoking flares, Dodsferd present The Parasitic Survival of the Human Race, an unruly, insurrectionary short collection of energetic blackened grooves. This represents something of a departure, seeing the band setting out from within depressive black metal’s icy wastelands, and instead packing their bags for a trip to a crust punk riot.
First track ‘Breeding Chaos’ sets out with a mid-speed rolling riff with Wrath’s squeezed screeching, before halfway through careening into a faster, rumbling section, then slower again, then faster then slower. This means that while the actual sound of the slower bits are pretty close to the depressive black metal sound of earlier releases such as Suicide and the Rest of Your Kind Will Follow, the crucial component of that atmosphere is missing, namely the sense of an unending expanse of leaden drumbeats, mournful guitar hiss and desperate screams in which to contemplate misery, hypocrisy and the darkness of swamps. The contagious riffs and committed delivery just about make the jump to crustiness worthwhile, though the themes of the titles still seem rooted in misanthropic underground black metal territory. Songs like ‘Creator of Disease’ and ‘Stupid Worthless Sheep’, together with the reference to parasites in the album title, for example, seem pretty disgusted with people in general, as does the press release about the band ‘desecrat[ing] the disease of humanity’.
On one (encrusted) hand, then, there’s loose-bass-riff-then-punk-chugging intro to the aforementioned Sheep song, the crust sound in general, and the Greek protest samples which extend into a siren curving over the beginning of ‘Creator of Disease’. On the other (depressive) hand, there’s the (albeit more uptempo) droning/drowning guitar at the end of the Sheepy one, the repetitive one-two minor chord changes in ‘Doubting Your Worth’, the grumpy titles and the general air of hatred and contempt brought over from previous albums. All of which means this recording is a slightly confusing mix, but the whole is engaging enough in its matching of furious anti-human rage with furious drums and riffs.
The masterstroke, then, is to finish off with a cover of the Misfits’ ‘We Are 138’: implying some kind of oppositional, communal something-or-other, but a completely ambiguous and undefined one, since no-one but Glenn Danzig purportedly knows what the hell 138 is supposed to signify. That hasn’t stopped The Internet having a lovely time speculating however… is it Herman Goerring’s IQ? A secret way of saying ‘one dirty ape’? Something to do with robots? Just the same, the difficult-to-pin-down combinations here don’t have to get in the way of enjoying this energetic blast of… well… whatever exactly it is.
