I hope you like loud guitars because Swamp is an album defined by its loud loud guitars. When I first started the album I thought it was a case of amateurish mixing but the more the album progressed, the more I settled into it and realised that, intentional or not, this album sounds exactly the way it's supposed to. See, I'm not much of a metal guy, I like a lot of metal for sure, but there are some albums that get praised to high heaven but to my ears sound a little flat, but that's not the case with this one. At no point during this album's 42ish minute playtime am I not paying attention to the guitars, the way the distortion plays with the wide range of frequencies an electric guitar can produce, and it's cool as hell.
The opening track, Headcold, brought a specific artist to mind. A great artist that, like so many famous people that I looked up to in my youth, turned out to be a real piece of shit - Marilyn Manson. I'm sure Nominal Anomaly are much nicer. Anyway, it's the catchy bluesy riff turned up to 11 that gives the track a real sense of fun and forward momentum. This leads to BULLfrog which has this weird ever-changing tempo that stretches and squashes your ears as you get through it. It's cheeky as all hell, and a stand out on the album for me.
When BTW there's a sense that maybe this one's a bit poppier, but it's a misdirection. Where BULLfrog would slow down and speed up, this one switches between a poppy indie rock riff and a loud metal chug. These are the kind of things that make the music hard to stop paying attention to.
I haven't even mentioned the vocals. I have no fucking idea what this guy is saying. It's all snarls and growls and even when I went to look at the lyrics I couldn't really ever align it with what I was hearing.
A note on that - the process of getting to the lyrics is irritating. Instead of just appearing on the Bandcamp page, you need to copy/paste a link and then CTRL+F the song title, and then they're written in the least legible font. It's crazy to me that one would go through all the effort of setting up a Bandcamp release and not bother copying over the lyrics, but anyway, that doesn't affect the music but it did annoy me and so I wanted to mention it.
The album carries on like that, with its loud and manic guitars and snarling vocals, in some ways it sounds like what my memory of hearing Slipknot for the first time sounds like, almost terrifyingly loud and aggressive. Suits is a particularly cool one, it's got this dirgy guitar opening before kicking off proper into a punky masterpiece.
Another one I really dug was Oblique Mass of Foundation. Again this is probably more punky which is maybe why it resonated with me that little bit more. It's so dissonant, so shouty, with lots of fun rhythmic switch ups.
I don't have much negative to say about it, really. I'm not sure how often I'll be coming back to it because it's pretty intense, but I really enjoyed my time listening to it.