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Released on February 17, 2015 via Relapse Records
Primitive Man out of Denver, Colorado are poised to release their second recording, an EP entitled Home Is Where The Hated Is, which is their first record out on major label Relapse Relapse. As a recent Denver transplant, I have been making it a point to try and focus on as much local music as possible, since the scene here is growing at an exciting rate, so, although I’ve never been a huge fan of this band, I decided to give the record a spin.
The cover of the album features, as far as I can tell, two large naked women and one fitter one with American flags covering their faces, sitting at a picnic table covered in weapons. While the imagery on this album does in some ways conjure up turn-of-the century records a la Dying Fetus and Misery Index, it makes sense knowing the band is from this area. As someone who grew up on the East Coast and moved to Middle America, I am realizing that many of the people whom these angry-at-the-nation bands are ranting about live in, well, Middle America.
Getting into the actual music on the EP, each of the four songs are very long and plodding, as is typical of sludgy doom. The first track, entitled ‘Loath’, is especially on the slow side, but it packs enough punch with the aggressive and hateful vocals to keep my interest. Then the next track, ‘Downfall,’ starts off with an almost desperate-sounding, fast and thrashy riff and then transitions to the slow, prodding material. I like all the music on the record, but my biggest problems was that by the third song, ‘Bag Man,’ my interest started to wane a little bit. I love slow and deliberate music; I can listen to Weedeater for hours on end and not get bored, but there is something about the sort of cave-man aggression that these dudes exude that loses me at some point. By the last track, ‘A Marriage with Nothingness,’ I was still digging it, but I still felt my mind wandering a bit.
This is definitely a good record, and what they are doing is certainly deliberate. The grindy and blackened influence and the aggression and hatred are all there and very legitimate, and something tells me this group wouldn’t want to sound any other way. If you know you enjoy that type of thing, then this record will probably be right up your alley. However, if your attention span is short and you like to keep it fast and thrashy, you will more than likely want to skip this one.
