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Corrupted: Paso inferior

03/11/09 || Khlysty

In my continuing contest for the World’s Most Fucked-Up Japanese Heavy Metal Band, I consider Corrupted to be beyond competition, and I’m not saying this as a compliment. These guys are seriously damaged and their music’s really testing the limits of everything that can be accepted as “normal” or even “fucked-up in an OK way”. Their brontosaurus-sized songs –basically one song per record…- are just a bit less abstract and amorphous than, say Sunn or Boris at their more frayed-nerves-and-caffeine-OD mode, and the band’s quirks are legion: they’re Japanese, playing a kind of extreme doom (imagine EHG in a REALLY low smack mood), with all the lyrics in fucking Spanish! Also, they never give interviews, neither do they have any promo photographs and they have a shitload of LP’s, EP’s, splits, 7’’s, 10’’s and whathaveyou, almost all of them in some completely underground Japanese label, so it’s almost impossible to follow their career trajectory. The only thing one can do is grab what one finds and try to get something out of it.

Also, I fuckin’ adore them!!! So fuck you and your preconceived notions of what “heavy” is. THIS is the real heavy, baby; can you handle it? Can you handle 42 minutes worth of doom as abstraction? Of vocals like those of a terminally constipated dragon who’s just woken up with a head-splitting hangover and thinks that you, YES YOU, are responsible for his misery, so he’s gonna fuck you and then eat you, just on principle? Can you handle 42 minutes of constant cochlear-ripping feed-back? Of ONE RIFF PLAYED OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER, UNTIL YOUR BRAIN DRAINS FROM YOUR NOSTRILS, WHILE YOU HELPLESSLY STUMBLE IN A PLACE WHERE TIME HAS CEASED TO EXIST AND YOUR ONLY REALITY IS THE NOISE REVERBERATING IN YOUR GRADUALLY EMPTYING SKULL? Of drums that stutter, appear and disappear, almost completely indifferent of keeping time, their only care being the adding of chaos into chaos?

If yes, then you’re one of the Blessed, who can see the light, walk on water, eat bullets and spit empty shells, live in constant Nirvana and enjoy the heaviest of the heavy. Corrupted’s “Paso Inferior” (which translates into “Underpass”) is exactly as I described it above. Only heavier, more strung-out, more chaotic, more oppressive and depressing, more formless, more insidious. These fucking Japs aren’t just pushing the boundaries of doom-ity and heaviness; they’re rewriting the rulebook, redefining the genre and pissing on anyone and everyone who thinks that “heavy” is something done just with lots of amps and detuned guitars and slow tempos. “Heavy” is not just density of sound, but, more importantly, the ability to convey feelings through sound. Well, the boys are doing exactly that and even if no-one understand one word from the lyrics –it’s immaterial that they’re in Spanish; they could have been in Hindu, for all the sense one can make out of they way they’re “sang”-, the sense of desperate oppressiveness that permeates the record is so palpable, that it comfuckingpletely drains the listener.

Corrupted is not a joke band; they’re deadly serious at what they do. And if they seem a bit OTT, well, that’s your problem. To me, this is one of the best records heavy music has to offer (and, well, just wait until I review “El Mundo Frio”…). Heavy, intelligent and then some… Domo arigato gozaimashita and muchas gracias.

9,5

Information
Released: 1997
Label: Frigidity Discos
Website: www.dxmxtx.com/corrupted
Band
Talbot: guitar
Jose: bass guitar
Chew Hasegawa: drums
Hevi: vocals

Tracklist
01. Paso inferior

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