Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Bedlam of Cacophony’s Neuroleptic.

Metal is essentially a modernist musical style. Since its very beginnings, metal has expanded what we think of as music by deconstructing – or outright doing away with – the schema we use to evaluate it. Metal bands constantly rub up against the limits of volume, speed, melody (or lack thereof) and other variables that all music engages in some way or another.

Even within a genre known for its pursuit of extremity, Neuroleptic, the debut album by Orange County’s Bedlam of Cacophony, stands out by hyper-extending pretty much every convention there is. Speeds alternate between grindcore fast and doom slow without notice. Riffs change quicker than your ears can process them, when they occur at all (much of the guitar playing is of the tap-heavy Psyopus variety). Sizzling distortion abuts clean fusion guitar tones. You’d be hard pressed to find two adjacent measures in the same time signature. Drummer Nate Cotton sounds like his kit is constantly exploding; three guest vocalists, including Cattle Decapitation/Murder Construct’s Travis Ryan, saddle the album with an intense case of multiple personality disorder. Hooks? Grooves? Tonal centers? All done away with. Neuroleptic blows by like four colliding tornados and dares you to keep up.

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Since the dawn of time over 9,000 years ago, man has achieved progress only by questioning himself, putting even his most basic assumptions to the test of rigorous, unforgiving critical analysis. Once upon a time, we believed that the sun revolved around the earth, all matter was made of four basic elements, and that Brujeria really were Mexican drug traffickers, but thanks to the tireless efforts of great thinkers like Galileo, Hobbes, and Hume, now we know better. In the same spirit of fearless intellectual honesty, I ask the readers of MetalSucks the following: which is the best, BLACK METAL or DEATH METAL???

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This guy really hates poser death metal drummers. Really hates ‘em! Like an Axl Rosenberg level of passionate hate. And as much as I wanna smack the guy for being an elitist prick who’s obviously got many years of practice under his belt and is flaunting it, at least he’s got the technique to back up all that talk. He’s got a point.

-VN

Thanks: Mike

This brilliant display of mathematics was sent in and created by MS Maniac AJ Zink (whose band Ovid’s Withering has a new track posted). Nice work, dude.

-VN