Despite its formation in 2009, Infestuous is a new brutal technical death metal band from Ohio. They've recently released their first full-length album, "Unfathomable Mutagenic Abominations," marking a huge step in their rather inactive career. Their other previous material was the lead singles released to attempt to garner some traction for their big day, and it did pretty well. Their one-and-only music video, published by Silent Pendulum Records, is reaching close to five thousand views, which, given the band's youth, is an achievement to brag about. I'll make sure they don't brag too hard, as the album's not that great.

Infestuous plays like they have three minutes of studio time left. Everything, from the instrumentation, the vocals, to the somewhat brickwalled mastering, is incredibly claustrophobic. The record is only twenty minutes long, yet Infestuous crammed seven tracks and an opening/closing sequence into it, meaning songs barely scratch three minutes apiece. This effect gives the album a blistering listening experience: you press play, greeted by an automated voice greeting you or some shit, you blink, and the same speaker is letting you know "sequence 001 [is] complete." If "Unfathomable Mutagenic Abominations" was sequence 001, I'm sure as hell dreading sequences 002-999. The constant mentioning of scientific language throughout the skits and earlier songs like "Assimilate: Annihilate" and "Transdimensional Malevolence" are scraps of a cohesive lyrical theme, but again, Infestuous is low on studio time, so they forget the sci-fi story and talk about "swimming...slathered in shit and grime" and sitting upon a "crusted throne," or, in laymans terms, a friggin' toilet. ("Palace of Rot," the track to receive the aforementioned music video treatment).

Infestuous' playing is tight, technical, a tad neoclassical (buzzword alert) à la Necrophagist, but way too condensed. The band tries to fit four hundred riffs, sixty million blast beats, and a shit-ton of gurgling into a sub-standard runtime. They succeed, but it sounds insanely convoluted. It's a shame, because the duo's musical prowess is there, but again, they went frugal on recording time, so instead of crafting a balanced track, they regurgitated everything they had and squeezed it with a hydraulic press. On the contrary, I appreciate their ambient-ish closer in "Flesh Unraveled," which shows that Infestuous may be cognizant of the need for a break, or the bookend solo in "Assimilate: Annihilate," another example of the goodness Infestuous can supply if they just slooooweeed dowwwnn.

I'm not against these Ohioan brutal death metallers because they can play. Hard. There's plenty of room to develop, experiment, and refine their style, and one thing that they'll benefit from is paying the studio owner more handsomely. Otherwise, it's another short session.