There is this thing going around, pretty small scale but I'm seriously hoping that it continues to spread, where bands ostensibly playing "old school death metal" (OSDM) are introducing industrial elements (namely Godflesh-esque grind and repetition) to their music. And I am lovin' it. I think the first band that really ground my brains to mulch with this approach was Legion of Andromeda, whose two albums and collab with Vomir are still some of the all-out heaviest and nastiest shit from the past decade of undergeround death metal, and Megascavenger came out around the same general time period with an album that veered into that direction as well. But Penny Coffin's mini-album Conscripted Morality is the most recent of these discoveries, via this 2023 CD edition from Scottish powerhouse At War With False Noise. And boy, does it scrape the bone clean.

Lyrics that combine religious references and excratory depravity with a vicious anti-authoritarian bent. Total negativity. Swells of cavernous, creepy guitars emerge from the underneath followed by the ring of a Tibetan-style prayer bowl and deep throat-singing; in the blink of an eye, though, that entrance on plumes of subterranean ether blasts off into the crazed death metal of "Ballistic", duly titled with its rigidly constructed blastbeats and shifts in precision drumming, moldy and monstrous guitar riffs and caveman bass spread out in an oilslick of gross dissonance and sudden shifts into a surprisingly grandiose doom-death riff style backed by orchestral synthesizer sounds and rotten-as-fuck vocal spew. That opener sets up an interesting contrast that continues through all four of Morality's fairly lengthy / meaty songs, balancing barbarous, stripped-down death chug and torturous slower sludginess (fronted by those totally incomprehensible gusts of verbal vomit, soaked in reverb and echo and christ knows what else) with some strikingly catchy moments of anthemic power and magesterial atmosphere that mostly come from out of left field. The old school, early 90s death metal sound is in full force, with a churning, rabid heaviness and sudden tempo changes that could wreck a bus (wait until you hear "Predator", good god), but the machinelike, militaristic double bass, strange electronic accompaniment, and passages of grueling looped industrial noise like the beginning of "Slowdive" (sounding like someone dropped a mid-80s Merzbow tape into the mix) give Penny Coffin its inhuman, unhealthy, mechanically-damaged presence that sets it apart from other "OSDM" outfits I'm listening to at the moment. That latter song has some of the most out-there "noisy" stuff on the disc, the grinding death backed up by walls of eerie tremolo-picked texture and the keyboards that at certain points have a vaguely Nocturnus-esque quality to them.

The title track likewise fuses the swirling fog of dissonant distorted menace and moments of melancholic melody, but the start-stop riffs that kick in are gargantuan, Bolt Thrower and Asphyx level chug-a-thon destruction all over the place. Pretty wicked. "Morality" also sports the only real guitar solo on the disc, I'm pretty sure, and the way that it drifts in and coils around the rest of the band right before they all come together into a sickeningly heavy droning breakdown awash in those soundscape elements is very well done. especially towards the climax when a whole violin section shows up and casts a mournful overcast ambience over everything, until it finally returns to those chanting monks and prayer bowl intonations. These guys definitely aren't doing anything "technical", but it's certainly different. A total wrecking ball, but with flourishes of something atmospheric and weird just beneath the surface level brutality. It goes without saying that I'm usually a huge fan of anything that At War With False Noise does death metal-wise. But Penny Coffin offer something catchier and memorable with their helllish skullcrunch. God help us when they return with a full length of this stuff.