Album Review: Broken Hope - Mutilation and Assimilation

Broken Hope were one of the last bands that I saw play live in Chicago before the pandemic put a hard stop to my show-going habit like a sparrow hitting the window of a downtown office building. Thankfully I was able to avoid the metaphorical equivalent to the twenty-foot fall that usually accompanies such a fateful collision. Others haven't been so lucky. I saw The Skull at the same show that I saw Broken Hope. I'm very thankful for this fact, as Eric Wagner is no longer with us- having been one of the many unfortunate casualties of COVID's passage through the Chicago music community. I can't know for sure, but I do trust that all of the members of Broken Hope have remained safe and healthy in the intervening years since I last saw them. It is a shame to lose anyone to this awful disease, let alone anyone involved in a Chicago institution like Broken Hope. 

In thinking about how simple my life was prior to pandemic radical reordering everything we once took for granted, I've felt compelled to go back and listen to some of my favorite releases from the last bands I had the good fortune to see perform before this no longer was an option. One of these albums has been Broken Hope's 2017 album Mutilation and Assimilation, and I can testify to you here and now, that it still rips as hard now as it did upon release. Mutilation and Assimilation is probably the band's most professional sounding and coherent releases after 1997's Loathing. It's quite a bit less ambitious than 1998's Grotesque Blessings, but it also feels more comfortable in its task and execution than 2013's Omen of Disease. Put simply, the album is a masterstroke of technical death metal, with phlegmy gore-metal vocals, dynamic blast-beats, and blocky chord progressions that revives the vile strains of the genre's '90s mutations in the vein of Deicide, Suffocation, and Gorguts. 

Mutilation and Assimilation is Broken Hope's seventh LP, and second since their 2012 reunion with Damian Leski of Gorgasm on vocals, who joined the project after the passing of former vocalist Joe Ptacek in 2010. Damian has an appropriately menacing voice for the band, but it's really the guitars and the drum work that cause their sound to adhere together like sinews to joint and ossein. 

Crushing grooves tow you into the mayhem of the titled track so that the lithe, quicksilver cleavers of the guitars may strip the flesh from your beleaguered carcass. Next, the galloping blast-beats and warped, mosh-inducing, tempo amping chords on "Blast Frozen" and the thrashy, bulldozer riffs of the blustering and gnashing "The Carrion Eaters" will reduce whatever is left to you to a fine grain and moldable pâté. Of course, if you really want to feel the full range and force to the band's sickeningly malic enterprise, there is always the pensive, wretchedly melodic "Hell's Handpuppets" with its scratch-fret, popping chords progressions and piston-like, death driving drumwork. Mutilation and Assimilation is an absolutely compelling horror show, one that is as clandestinely brutal as its name implies. 

Mutilation and Assimilation is out via Century Media.