Artist: Plague Throat
Album: An Exordium To Contagion
Label: Incanned Productions
Release Date: August 8, 2013
When it comes to rock and metal in India, these people from North India have constantly proved to be quite talented and skilled. Be it the frisky essence of blues or high-tempo paced agony of death metal, they master it all, from engineering brilliant riffs to selection of guitar tones. One such band hailing from the rock capital of India is Plague Throat.
Plague Throat is a three piece death metal band from Shillong, consisting of Nangsan on guitars and vocals, Iaidon on bass and vocals and Malice on drums. They played their first show at PowerPlay, a local metal show held at U Soso Tham Auditorium in Shillong on August 8, 2008 (08/08/08) and after exactly five years from the day, the band released its first EP, ‘An Exordium To Contagion’ on August 8, 2013 with the same line-up as it was on the day of their first concert, which is quite brilliant.
‘An Exordium To Contagion’ is a rather perfect example of how death metal in the North-east is: heavy and downright brutal. Clocking in at just under fifteen minutes, the EP has only four songs; yeah, quite short but heavy enough to throw you into the pit. The first track, ‘The Pretentious And The Deceived’ pierces in through a ferocious drum line, the drums though being quite prominently programmed. The song has excellently constructed sections, graced with thrashy riffs played on low tuned guitars. The riffs in bridges, especially, are quite organic and pounding as opposed to the ear-splitting tremolo-picked riffs in choruses.
I loved the flow and ferocity present in the song although the theme seems to be a bit disappointing. Now I don’t have the lyrics with me and obviously I couldn’t comprehend what was being sung but from the title, it appears that the song is about the pompous nature of our society, which in my opinion kinda doesn’t fit. The sound is too brutal and vicious to be talking about a social issue. Anyways, the second track, ‘Burn’, is another swift, short-of-breath and heavy as hell piece composed mainly of thrashy riffs which sound just brilliant with the guttural vocals given by Nangsan. When it comes to mosh-provoking, aggressive death metal, Plague Throat doesn’t disappoint.
‘Present Chaos’ is a pretty famous song which has been featured in many compilations like ‘Brutal Pokhara: Occult Science of Metal’, ‘Putrid Ascendancy: Ascending True Indian Metal’, ‘Brutal Pokhara: Build On Chaos Field’ and ‘Metal Spree: New Year Killing Spree’. And no doubt the song has been engineered brilliantly with a variety of astounding progressions which are connected by fantastic bridges, strikingly typifying the steel-toed American death metal sound, the kind you generally find in bands like Cannibal Corpse, Dying Fetus etc.
The last song would be the longest and apparently the most whimsical on the album. The song travels through a lot of variations and offers us quite a mottled assortment of progressions of varying tempos. The drum lines and guitar progressions are kinda complex and we can witness a few breakdowns, a trait we generally come across in most Indian modern death metal songs. However, the complexity doesn’t fiddle with the track’s bare sound which is overall quite malicious. The production of the album is fairly average. The guitar patches have been carefully selected and equalized and overall the instruments have been panned aptly and the tracks carry a good amount of dynamics. However as I pointed earlier, the programmed drums are too obvious, which sort of muddles with austereness of the sound.
In the end, I would say that the album does give us some headbangable and backbiting music, although it lacks the innovativeness and nothing very new is kept on the plate, which I believe is one thing which a release should possess. But overall, the sound is quite brilliant and if you’re looking for some brutal and heavy music, then this album is for you.
