The free jazz and experimental underground sound sprite Dead Neanderthals is animated through the incantations and codifying intentions of Dutch duo Otto Kokke and René Aquarius, performing the sax and drums respectively. Throughout the years they have hunted the beats of the celestial plain to steal from them the mysteries of the meta-reality that ungirds the plain of illusion that the rest of us lowly humans inhabit. Through countless collaborations and hours of insight mining, Dead Neanderthals have assembled a prodigious catalog of wildly divergent releases that evocatively intertwine elements of noise, drone, and even grindcore into a pantheon of genre breaching scions of dimension piercing consciousness.
2020 was meant to be the band’s 10th anniversary year, celebrated with a four-set performance at this year’s Roadburn, an occasion that was dashed due to COVID. The only semblance of the circumvented celebration is a new real EP dropped by the band this past July, titled Blood Rite. Now, most of Dead Neanderthals’ albums are notable for their subtlety of form and construction; even when they embrace harsh aesthetics, Blood Rite is not that.
Switching out the sax for a murderous, cacophonous synth tone, the latest EP from Dead Neanderthals is a single-track, brutalizing doom-death annihilation exhibition. It sounds like this album is flowing out of the front doors of a burning cathedral that is slowly being sucked into the chasms of hell. René’s vocals sound like the cries of a beast unearthing itself from a death-like slumber, clawing its way out from under the weight of dead earth and through a trellis of rotten tree roots. The synths, as previously mentioned, have a teeth-bared snarl to them that rivals the threat made by even the fiercest of death metal guitar feedback. This is not a good place to start if you are new to Dead Neanderthals’s work, but if you are looking for something to smash the dense monotony of your day into a thousand spinning shards, then I suggest you take the collar off this animal and let it run wild in your head chamber.