A transatlantic project bringing together Scottish and American musicians, Frontierer have established themselves as one of the most extreme and disorienting outfits in contemporary mathcore. In the wake of The Dillinger Escape Plan, the band push to the extreme the art of dissonance, syncopation and saturation, to the point of making their music almost physically gruelling. Oxidized does not break this rule: it is an experience of permanent assault.
The critics (an 82 average across six reviews) hail a work of rare intensity, as hard to access as it is exhilarating for whoever accepts to lose themselves in it. The press praise the density of a record where every second seems saturated with information, where the guitars spit metallic, grinding textures evoking the rust of the title.
Musically, Oxidized is a wall: dislocated rhythms, raw screams, abrasive riffs that slip away beneath the listener’s feet. The band seek not comfort but vertigo, immersion in an apparent chaos that in reality obeys an implacable logic. It is an engineer’s mathcore, calculated to the point of suffocation.
The price of this radicalism is obvious: Oxidized exhausts as much as it fascinates, and its extreme density makes prolonged listening gruelling, almost monolithic. For lack of genuine breathers, the record risks tiring the uninitiated listener, overwhelmed by a relentless deluge.
Verdict: 8/10. An uncompromising, suffocating record, reserved for lovers of the extreme, but whose mastery of chaos commands admiration.
