Cut loose of fleshborne disorder and sagging under the weight of a hundred leftover folds the ghastly state of Monterey Bay, California-based melodic death/goregrind project LIPOMA post-excision is mired in the horror of uglier-than-thou past yet directed by their own ambitions on this third full-length album, a deeper-still evolution beyond the last. ‘No Cure for the Sick‘ finds the solo project looking past any further iteration on their melodeath-meets-goregrind with an album that incorporates modern black metal rhythms and folken keyboards to better round their camp into a full-on circus. Though that ambition serves a fresh sound on paper the result is arguably more memorable for its shocking oddity than it is for the songs themselves, leading to an entertaining if not inconsistent experience.

Borne in pandemic-era New York city Lipoma became a thing back in 2021 by way of Max ‘Dr. Lipoma’ Pierce who’d been prolific from the start releasing five EPs and a split in the second half of that year. Their style initially focused on what most would consider bedroom goregrind, a sect which is void of the hardcore punk influenced tempo of grindcore but resembles the extremes of late 80’s Carcass translated to the early 90’s underground (re: Pathologist, Regurgitate, et al.) by way of guttural/pitch-shifted vocals and drum-machined brutal death drumming. If you’re not familiar with the generations beyond ‘Reek of Putrefaction‘, specifically its post-millennial homebrewed extremes, you’ll at least appreciate the modulated pitch on the vocals as signifier. The early 2000’s were a hotbed for a broad exploration of those extremes and this fellows work was definitely not say, Last Days of Humanity in effect so much as in the vein of earlier Pharmacist.

Four split releases and three compilations in 2022 would eventually lead to a debut LP (‘Horrors of Pathology‘, 2022) where you might not expect melodic death metal inspired guitar work as the result of iteration but it kind of makes sense as goregrind, death n’ roll and melodeath all have some sort of tangential genetic relativity. While I was keen to identify the combination of many elements in their sound it’d been more of a novel gimmick, a bit of “fun” shtick in passing. At some point I’d been sent or recommended Lipoma‘s second LP, ‘Odes to Suffering‘ (2023), with the suggestion that their work was similar to Miasmatic Necrosis (it definitely is not) but at that point Pierce‘s work had become something else entirely as his exploration of quasi-melodic death metal guitar progressions only retained the vocal effects of its past. The most direct context for what ‘No Cure for the Sick‘ is comes by way of that second full-length, each release can be found digging a bit deeper into the melodic frontage of the last while composing with more than one main rhythm guitar thread and one lead voicing in mind.

Up front I’ll say I’m not a particularly dedicated fan of goregrind, at all, and don’t believe every stage of Carcass‘ roundabout early development was worthy of expansion but I do appreciate a musician who shows their work and aims for something different even if they never reach a point of refinement. No doubt ‘No Cure for the Sick‘ is honed in terms of its ideas and musical development and less so its execution as Lipoma are nearly reaching for !T.O.O.H.! levels of zany muse here, recalling the more roughshod recordings from Sigh where melodious highs and blasted-at extremes make for a curious, uncomfortably set gig. You’ll get what I mean when opener “Sea Surgeon” hits and honks through its jolly keys and black metal swayed hand, sounding like a pirate metal satire with goregrind vocals. From that point the next few pieces hit upon a Xysma-esque roll into melodic death (“Glory to the Blade”), a ‘Beat the Bastards‘-esque metalpunk riff or two (“Flesh of the Damned”) and each feature some manner of pseudo-neoclassical lead guitar melody in hand.

Are these inherently good songs or is the vocal style essentially carrying the interest of goregrind fans through generica? I wouldn’t be that harsh but there is yet the feeling of a fledgling bedroom grind band going bedroom melodeath (which was definitely a thing in the MySpace era). We do get some practiced dual leads on “Cult of the Firehealers” but these moments, and the lead guitar directive in general, feel like they’ve more in common with a post-Windir band like Cor Scorpii when approaching scale-running melody versus the heavy metal affect of melodic death metal proper. With that said I appreciated when this album was just kind of batshit weird, such as the jaunty roll through “Remedies of Pagan Medicine” that’d probably been the point where this strange mélange of groaty sub-genre and absurd austerity achieve full circus mode, reaching a point of mildly tuneful bop with it.

From there we mostly get vignettes, sparks of melodic ideas which speak to a far more modern sense of melody which fans of 90’s melodic death won’t likely appreciate as gleeful, kinda college rocking uplift (see: “Psalms of Psoriasis”) that has more in common with Pelican than In Flames at the end of the day. The suggested pop-punk inspiration comes into play most clearly closer to the end of ‘No Cure for the Sick‘ with “Cardiac Scars Forever” linking a sort of atmospheric black metal lightness with a dramatic lead melody and occasionally chugging rhythms. I’m not sure if “goregrind/indie rock motif with symphonic elements” is necessarily a place I’m willing to spend much of my sentience focused upon personally… but I can appreciate that Lipoma are just doing whatever they want by the end of this record and basically just barfing over the top of it and calling it goregrind.

What ‘No Cure for the Sick‘ lacks compared to Lipoma‘s previous major releases is a sense of consistency, a specific relation (or progression) perceived between the pieces on this album in sequence or tone. Reaching the endpoint on the album via the title track/closer and finding myself no longer charmed by the juxtaposition of muffled, incoherent vocals atop jolly keys-tapping Euro-fest apropos melodic metal left a lot to be desired even if the process of discovery was entertaining. I’d appreciated the variety on hand ’til the record failed to deliver upon both inadvisably gory, lo-fi grime -or- earworming melody, mastering neither on the ride through. For a specific type of fan this will be a notable curio, maybe not a lasting set of songs but an example of something markedly different from set expectations and there is value in said exploration. At this point they’re reaching a point of putting together a live band, testing this material on the road and in this sense I’d viewed this third album as a critical mass for their formative years. My only concern is that this isn’t an identity set so much as a prompt to continue to evolve, their greater beast is still grafting on additional heads and this record finds ’em in the process of learning to communicate between one another. A moderate recommendation.

---