Sunday, July 8, 2012

Lumpur - Skema Pembalasan Sempurna (2012; New Standard Elite Records)

According to Google Analytics, the Indonesian version of google, google.co.id, refers the most traffic of any country's google portal to Slam-Minded. We get more hits from Indonesia than Germany, Canada, or the UK. This tells me that there is a passion for brutal death metal in Indonesia so I thought I'd try to find a deserving Indonesian band to review.

Thanks to some recommendations I found a very deserving candidate in Lumpur, who hail from Bandung on the island of Java. After 9 years of silence (including a 6 year hiatus), Lumpur have released a short, but powerful EP entitled Skema Pembalasan Sempurna. I say powerful because Lumpur jam a lot of metal  into this EP's 14 minutes. I've heard full lengths with less brutal slamming than Skema Pembalasan Sempurna. Lumpur play an absolutely relentless style that, while not particular fast or harsh, continually flows over you and breaks you down (in a good way). The riffing doesn't stop, it just carries you along with it. Lumpur have definitely taken a more holistic approach to songwriting, which I think works exceptionally well for the EP format. Each individual song works together with the other songs on the album to create a complete work. This really speaks to Lumpur's songwriting skill.

The riffing style here definitely borrows from deathgrind, which I like. There's a backbone of chugging that the bass and drums stick to, while the guitar ventures out using tremolo riffs and pinch harmonics. There's definitely a subtlety here that again speaks to the skill of the band. They keep up  a steady beat of destruction  whereas a lot of other bands try too many things at once and thereby create a muddled mess. Skema Pembalasan Sempurna is not simple by any means, but Lumpur stick to a particular style, which makes the album a more unified and memorable experience.

I have still just begun exploring the world of Indonesian brutal death metal, but if there are more albums like this, I am sure that I will like what I find.

6 comments:

Cerebral Reviewment said...

Fuck yeah Lumpur is way slept on. Great review!

Metal2hu said...

It's not all that surprising that you should get so many hits from Indonesia. In terms of ratio, there are more brutal death metal bands in Indonesia than there are anywhere else in the entire world.

Ferran ViƱas said...

Hi all i'm new to the blog and i just discovered the slam death metal genre. I really love it but i've problems to diference it from brutal death, is there some trick to diference slam from brutal???

Thanks alot and congrats for that amazing blog
Hail from spain

Anonymous said...

for slamming or brutal death band from indonesia maybe you can try turbidity[indonesian] , undergod, for review you can check at youtube :D

hail yeah from Indonesia
thanks for share \m/

Anonymous said...

Obscure Slam Vomition by Afflictive Emasculation is a must review. if you havent already

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