The conquest of weaker forms of life, their corpses piled high in glorious display of power and abundance, cannot become a secreted-away truth of any truly communal culture. Without tangible excess stores and options available to the omnivore experience the lost sensations of blood, fear and feast held fast in mind threatens to sever our upper primate sentience. Without the grotesque truth of the great upright ape on display the genius beyond mere survival will sour toward the devolved, combative territorial beast which we see arisen around the fringes of the uneducated as all environs rescind their plethora. A meeting of ancient technology, simian displays, cryptid marvels and horrified pseudoscientific muse Santa Cruz, California-based death metal crew Dipygus open their ‘Wet Market‘ mLP as an interstitial bounty of experimentation where both signature wiles and freshly vexing craft spin the roulette in signaling what may come.

Since I’ve written about this band’s first two full-lengths ‘Deathooze‘ (2019) and ‘Bushmeat‘ (2021) in some detail and because this was a personal purchase rather than a submission I’ll keep my thoughts fairly succinct. First, these songs lend a bit more coherence to the physical actions of the band rather than garbling and gargling it all in their ‘old school’ death metal blender of forms. We hear the riffs, the solos spread their wings a bit when possible and each song gasps for air at some point to keep the churn moving. The overall render comes with contributions from members of Ghoul, Exhumed, and Autopsy who contribute to the engineering, mix, and master of the record and this lines up with most all of their previous recordings but the separation between the foliage and the beasts themselves makes for a subject-forward sound design which still has some lush background action keeping things color riche.

A couple riffs heat up to the feverish primal clip of Abscess, one even sounds a bit like something off ‘Spiritual Healing‘, and they’ve still got that grinding, thrashing and doom-readied circa ’92 Autopsy-esque feeling in both hands, squishing loud and out of control most of the time. Dipygus haven’t always sounded this effortless and skilled and I suppose part of that is jawing at it for several years now. I figure it is just as important that they’ve found a strong atmospheric ideal going on here alongside riffs and plenty of experimental or kitsch ‘old school’ muckery such as pitch-shifted vocals on “Living Fossil (瑞洋丸)”. This is -almost- as cool as the electro-outros to “Bug Sounds (Osedax)” and closer “Onslaught of the Mechanikong Jungle Krusher” which is probably one of the most memorable parts on the album beyond the crusty death metal gig they’re so expertly pushing elsewhere.

At ~26 minutes in length and sporting some of their clearest yet most crooked-ass work to date ‘Wet Market‘ find s the band basically running laps around the ring here, making a serious argument that this is one of the more essential releases from the group to date. As far as I know they’re working on album number three at this point and this couldn’t be a more perfect hype-inducer leading up ’til that point and feels just as substantial as some of their LPs ’til this point. A high recommendation.

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