One of the first things people mention about the Baltimore metal band, Noisem, is their youth. This seems increasingly less important in the Internet age, when a 10-year-old can download the entire Carcass discography at the click of a button, and searching out obscure, far-flung scenes isn't as hard as it once was. We're living in a time when a novice can become an "expert" in a night, even if they don’t understand what begat what or comprehend the context. And that's why Noisem impressed people with 2013 debut, Agony Defined: Here we had guys between the ages of 15 and 20 coming off like folks twice their age, adroitly resurrecting the past.
Agony Defined, which blurred nine songs into 26 minutes, was exhilarating, a mix of old-school whammy bar-rich thrash and death metal with little bits of grind and punk thrown about. People were fair when they brought up Slayer and Napalm Death's Scum. As mentioned when I called it my 10th favorite metal album of 2013, it reminds me of the more extreme music that got me into metal as a kid, when I'd moved beyond the hair metal of my older sister and MTV and discovered speed and thrash at the pay-to-play venues in southern New Jersey. Their second album, Blossoming Decay, is burlier. The playing itself sturdier, faster, and more hulking.
Some of this could be due to the lineup change: bassist Yago Ventura is now handling guitar and vocalist Tyler Carnes' older brother, Billy, who also did the cover art, is on bass. (It's probably worth noting that the group now features two sets of brothers: the Carneses along with drummer Harley Phillips and his brother, guitarist Sebastian.) More likely, though, it's about getting more comfortable as songwriters and experimenters, hence the ambient cello pieces that start the first and second sides with an eerie, heavy drone. The blazing solos are still there, but the actual riffs pull as much of your attention this time. That, and the singing is freer, gnarlier, and more rabid—it's a nonstop vocal attack that comes off more punk and personal than Agony.
On Blossoming, Noisem have worked in larger doses of grind and death and punk; there's less time to take hold of the whammy. We get nine songs in 24 minutes, and that includes those cello pieces (which come off as soft, low-tech industrial ambiance) as well as the 4-minute "Cascade of Scars", which opens on a doom note, and momentarily brings to mind Converge. For such a short album, there's plenty of variation, like the floor-punching youth crew pulse in "1132", the catchy opener "Trail of Perturbation", the blistering shout-along in "Replant and Repress". This is a record that'll appeal to punk kids—and Trash Talk fans—as much as it'll blow the minds of metalheads.
In part, this is because, for all the technical prowess, there's a lot of heart on the record. In a recent Decibel feature, the Carnes brothers talked about their mother abandoning them at a young age, and being raised by their rock'n'roll-friendly father (who stole Billy a guitar to practice on when he was a kid). Tyler's mentioned being into Robert Smith's lyrics, and the words of Converge's Jacob Bannon—poetry, more or less. This album carries that kind of weight: flowers are reincarnated as shards (and, later tossed into the sea) and there are suicidal thoughts, sinking stomachs, lacerations, hazy memories. There's a lot of blood and more than a few knives. There's a general anxiety, along with a song called "Another Night Sleeping in the Cold", that resonates deeply when you know the singer's backstory.
This human element of Noisem is appealing. These are not songs about horror films, they're songs about the personal horrors of life and living. Which may be another reason that, as brief and rabid as these songs are, they stick with you. At the end of this cacophony, it's easy to want to listen all over again. And it's just as easy to be excited about how much these guys have already progressed in such a short time, and how much more music they have left to create.
