Burial Grid - NORD Compendium

 Released: October 31

Having followed the work of Burial Grid for years now, I was pretty thrilled to hear a month or two ago that he had a new album coming up. Now that it’s out and I’ve had a chance to give it a few good listens, I have to say that it’s a rather interesting evolution in the overall motif of Burial Grid. The project has always centered around a kind of playful morbidity, acknowledging the mortality of each of us with a wink and a nod towards giving a wry laugh towards it all. But what stood out in this iteration is the penchant for so much noise and generally more discombobulated feeling between all the elements. Where Waves of Quietus felt like gentle realizations and Music for No Tommorrow felt kind of like a manic episode, NORD Compendium is an omnidirectional seething. It takes the concept of being cursed with some rare and poorly understood disease and explains in a way that is noisy, loud, and unrestrained in its verbiage. 

Many of the tracks on the album have a less structured feel to them, improvising on each part and adding extra textures that build on top of or contrast drastically with each other in alternating fashion. One of the tighter tracks on the album is “Imperforate Anus,” which features a solid rhythm for much of it that borrows a lot from a doom metal and sludge perspective as industrial inspired synths rage on. The lyrics… well they’re definitely on topic and they share that gurgling seethe approach that most of the lyrics found elsewhere on the album have as well. The vocals are also an element of the album that really sells the atmosphere as well as Adam gurgles and scratchily whispers into a vocal chain that feels like a psychedelic horror experience. 

For me, it’s really just the underlying grossness of the concept that shines through the best on this album. A quick Google search can tell you all the horrifying details of the conditions named here and the music does a great job of building on this. What you end up with is an album that explores an all too realistic variation of body horror. Kind of like if someone stuck Cronenberg in a room full of analog synths and told him to “come up with something” and “make it believable.” And then, he pulls it off successfully.