It has all been a bit quiet in the Aborym camp since the release of 2006 album ‘Generator’. It seems that they have slimmed down to a trio with old vocalist Prime Evil having decamped and founding member Malfeitor Fabban having added singing to his repertoire and taken this over along with bass and some keyboards. The group’s line-up has always been in a bit of a state of flux anyway, the Italian / Scandinavian collaboration often being tested when member’s day jobs got in the way. Obviously Attila Csihar and Set Teitan have their hands full at present but drummer Bård G. "Faust" Eithun seems to have found the time for this album along with all the other groups he hits things for.
‘Psychogrotesque’ is divided into ten parts each simply named after corresponding Roman numeral. It is described as a “harsh sonic monolith of sickness and depravity" and the cover art kind of gives things a conceptual illustration of an asylum and again is best described thematically by Fabaan as a “realistic story about the horrific human aridity and its fragile impotence.” So you can no doubt guess that this is not going to be a nice bedtime story of an album. The first part is anything but, there are electronic sounds that are like the opening of secure doors (maybe in a maximum security twilight home) and the nasty buzzing of flies no doubt hatched from some foul rotting mess. From there we go into a wild deluge of sound. There are plenty of collaborators on the album but the saxophone of Marcello Balena is very dramatically noticeable as it twists and turns like a mad John Zorn composition. It was after hearing this I noted that the album was mixed and mastered with the sound consulting of Marc Urselli who had been involved with Zorn, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson in the past, so guess they got that spot on. The vocals are wretched and cadaverous as they rasp and the whole thing has an unpleasant and disease ridden schizophrenic feel to it, the disease being very much that of the mind. The chaos rattles into a fragment of drum and bass, flies buzz and we are seamlessly thrust into the third segment as the madness intensifies.
There is a fairly long ambient section next with spoken words in Italian; this is unfortunately lost on me although the keyboard flow has a nice space age feel reminiscent a bit of Vangelis ‘Blade Runner’ score. By part V lots of things are going on, some nice melodic clean vocals and a burgeoning and rampant musical assault with a heavy electronic backbone wrapped and warped around it. The album is an interesting and heady trip and should go down well with Aborym fans who have patiently been waiting for something new. My one complaint is that I feel like a bit of an outsider not understanding quite what is going on with the story, why for instance is there a passage of female soprano opera? It wouldn’t be an Aborym album without a sudden burst of glo-stick waving EBM rave music and this comes at VIII along with some clean singing and a bouncy melody rather like the Deathstars on crack before the track gradually folds in on itself, into a wind up musical box playing ‘Over The Rainbow.’
Concept albums on madness, as this essentially is, are hardly new but Aborym have certainly got the feel of bedlam across, they were never the sanest bunch anyway so were no doubt already half way there. Not sure how the hell this would translate onto the stage but the group are hardly the most prolific in this respect either. Psychogrotesque is an interesting album to get your head round though, that’s for sure.
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