Pyrrhon occupy, in contemporary death metal, an avowedly avant-garde position. The New York band have made themselves the champions of a dissonant, deconstructed death metal in which the influence of free jazz and noise vies with pure brutality. Exhaust, hailed by the critics (an 84 average across nine reviews), pushes this aesthetic of overload to its breaking point while gaining in clarity.
The record takes as its theme exhaustion — of the body, of the world, of late capitalism — and its music espouses that logic: saturated, dense, suffocating. The guitars spit angular dissonances, the drums race in impossible polyrhythms, Doug Moore’s voice vomits a flood of lucid rage. This is a death metal that thinks, that comments, that refuses the comfort of the formula.
The critics hail the way Exhaust channels this apparent chaos. For beneath the disorder surfaces a rigorous writing, almost scientific in its arrangement. The tortuous tracks allow for noise breaths, almost groovy passages that make the whole more legible than before without stripping any of its violence.
This exigency has its downside: Exhaust does not give itself easily, and its aridity will repel lovers of a more frontal death metal. The record demands attention, patience, a form of surrender. Not all will consent to it.
Verdict: 8.5/10. A cerebral, furious record at the cutting edge of a death metal that refuses to repeat itself. A work of rare intelligence, as gruelling as it is stimulating.
