Hailing from the West Coast city of Sacramento, California, Tentacult has been releasing quality material for a couple years and have established their own sound and blend of influences that set them apart. ‘Synaptic Perfidy’ is an album I stumbled upon a few months back and have really enjoyed listening to this year. I found it to have competent, thoughtful and intense songwriting with creative ideas and varied influences from across the board. There’s slow, super emotional Doom riffing mixed with almost Demilich alien sounding parts at times and Ripping Corpse type more thrashy/technical sections and at other times music that sounds sort of like ‘Individual Thought Patterns’-era Death blended amidst the foundational context of a lumbering Death/Doom monstrosity.
The bass tone is clanky and overdriven with a tone reminiscent of 1980’s Hardcore Punk and gets some chances to shine and stand out such as on ‘Caustic Integration’ and ‘Metastasized Corruption’. The vocals are sometimes low guttural cave vocals that sound like the growl of an underground dwelling monster and at other times more goblin-like, scratchy and mid range. The drums pound away and hold their weight well, there isn’t an abundance of faster blastbeat style drum work on here but everything is on point and sounds great. The riffs are large and in charge and carry the music forward. Tones are chunky and clear. Solos are badass and ripping. The production is massive and the writing interplay of guitars, synths and vocals are always shifting as the drums and bass lay the base layers and churn away like the dual engines on a freighter.
This is an emotionally harrowing adventure that will find you having an out of body experience, one moment feeling like floating and then the next it’ll slap you with these devastating dissonant abyss chords. The album builds toward the finale ‘Subjugated to Eternal Quiescence’ which clocks in at 11 minutes in length, a fitting capstone to this work. I would describe their sound as something like Progressive Death-Doom. Overall this album is exemplified by the excellent musicianship across the board, trippy almost Avant-Garde instrumentals hold their heft and it contributes something interesting and slightly more extraterrestrial to the Death/Doom palette. The amazing cover painting by Kenya Cavasos represents the feeling of the music quite well and I recommend this to people looking for something new and out-of-this-world sounding.
