Reekmind – Mired in the Reek of Grief

The guys in Reekmind are one ugly bunch of bastards. When I first got my filthy paws on their debut release, a greasy sweat broke out on my forehead and my sphincter started contracting spontaneously and irregularly. The stars had aligned: everything about this release felt right, the nearly illegible logo, the slime-coated artwork by Serus, and, of course, the fact that they’re an Australian trio. As everyone knows by now, there’s always a screw loose with the Aussies, so I was on the edge of my seat to plunge into this wretched slab of Old School Death Metal.

Oops. Five tracks, forty minutes. I had expected a savage, boiling, rampaging storm of Death Metal, something to blast the birds from the sky, curse my children with permanent tinnitus, and maybe even cure my wife’s creeping menopause. But none of that happened. Instead, a slow, suffocating ooze began to drip from my speakers. For a while, it felt like I was listening to the same song on repeat. FVKKK. What a letdown.

But I’m a stubborn bastard. So I listened again. And again. And again. And slowly, something clicked. In my overly eager imagination, I had pictured Mel Gibson as Mad Max tearing through the Australian outback in his supercharged 1973 Ford Falcon Interceptor. But that image was completely off. What I should have pictured was Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (aka The Mountain) slowly grinding forward in a 188-ton Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus, filled to the brim with kerosene and flattening everything in its path. Slow but devastating.

I hope you’re still with me, dear readers, because Reekmind haven’t made things easy—for themselves or for us. The band is like a rusty, monstrous war machine that takes ages to reach cruising speed, but once it does, it burrows into your brain and crushes what little sanity you had left.

Opening track ‘The Reekmind’ is a three-minute, trance-inducing bone grinder. Vocal support appears on ‘Wading in a Body of Death,’ vomited forth by Aaron Osborne (Extortion, I Exist, etc.), and again on the 11+ minute closer ‘A Lingering Mephitic Fog’, regurgitated by Brendan Sloan (Altars, Convulsing, Dumbsaint). And it’s only there, at the bitter end, that we get something even remotely resembling a tempo shift from this all-consuming Doom-Death behemoth.

To their credit, the trio are actually damn good musicians, something often overlooked in this kind of slow-motion sonic brutality. Brayden’s drumming is full of tasteful fills and subtle details, giving shape to the trudging riffs. Dane’s mid-pitched growls are articulate and forceful, avoiding the flat, soggy monotony that ultra-low vocals often fall into.

Bottom line: give Reekmind your time. Be patient. Let their crushing death/doom seep through your skull, until, like me, you feel your sphincter twitch spontaneously and irregularly.