Without question, here is the dirtiest, most grime-entangled piece of death metal purity your ears will bear witness to this year! And it is thanks to the debut album, Final Man by Melbourne band Contaminated. It absolutely strips the genre of old-school death metal back to its core.
Bearing witness to the cover and its cavernous maw of bleak, black-and-grey clearly and uncompromisingly gives you a perfect representation of what you’ll be hearing.
Musically, Final Man spits hints of early Entombed, Bolt Thrower, and the ethereal dark of Disembowelment.
Contaminated are revisiting a youth love affair for when extreme metal was never about slick, stylized production and glamour hoping to sell units. Bands such as Contaminated and their forefathers were only ever about encapsulating an artistic form and showing the world beyond what both themselves and their visions and inspiration was truly about, and of how much extreme music meant to them, regardless of how confronting it was. Whether that be the artwork, song titles and their lyrical meaning or the cranium-splitting wall of noise and devotion regurgitated courtesy of our stereo speakers.
Final Man shows absolute discontent for the world it inhabits (as if the title didn’t point that out!). “Squalid Survival” is a the most perfect spine-smashing opener that prepares our ears for the gaping maw of bile-filled excellence you are likely to hear. And from there, eight more songs of cataclysmic desolation and extreme wastelands of Entombed-inspired guitar sounds, courtesy of founding member Lachy and backed solidly by Matt, drums slaughtered by Cristoph, the bottom end handled as eloquently as sludge permits by Nick. But it is, without a doubt, the vocals unapologetically spat at us by Zev that I think epitomises Contaminated as a whole, and as this destructive, filth-ridden force.
The song titles delicately lube us for what we can expect next: the likes of “No Time to Rot”, “Boneless Mass”, “Forlorn and Desolate”; but what gets me is the romantically titled, “Mired in Shit”!
I have been trying to find a way to perfectly give this album an accurate summation of all of its parts, and for me, “Mired in Shit” is the song that gives it its perfect description.
And that, readers, is in no way a bad thing. Final Man is local lads, Contaminated’s gift to this world where humanity slowly gets by having wave-after-wave of tsunami-like faeces flung at us in the hope that we can make it home unscathed.
Hearing Final Man, there is no way we could ever hope to wash off Contaminated and their extreme, slime-filled wall of death metal purity, and how devastating and uncompromising it is from our forever tainted flesh.
