I knew that Hawaii had a fairly thriving metal scene (mainly based around the Honolulu area), at least going back to the band Hawaii (aka Vixen), an early 1980s speed / heavy metal band that featured one Marty Friedman on guitar. But as far as more extreme sounds, I've been completely out of the loop. Recent digging around to learn more about the state's metal history turns up a small but interesting death / black metal underground, but then I stumbled across Fastidium. Coming from the island of Oahu, this new band stomped my brain into the mud after watching some of the live sets on Youtube - this four-piece comes out of nowhere with amazingly warped and deranged brand of gnarly death metal that sounds thoroughly unhinged. Spewing a chaotic storm of dissonant death metal riffs, cavernous blast, offbeat atonal guitar leads, maniacal shrieks and chunk-blowing guttural roars, and spurts of hideous noise and nightmare sound-collage, Fastidium invoke certain aspects of that crazed Canadian / Australian death chaos alongside their rampaging thrash and almost math-rock-esque tangles of weird melody and time changes. They've planted a bloody boot mark onto their particular style of sinister, snarling death, which has now been documented via their lengthy self-titled EP that surfaced on their Bandcamp page in 2024. And finally, this material is being properly presented on physical media via this limited-edition cassette that also includes almost twenty-five minutes of additional unreleased material on the B-side, two long tracks of improvised, experimental insanity exclusive to this release.

The six EP tracks begin with a slow-motion collapse of sonic architecture, rumbling bass static and eerie choral sounds, distant liturgical chants and eruptions of tectonic chaos. It dissolves into the pulverizing death of "Imbecile Spirit", as vocalist Mikey (who was at one point a vocalist for no-wave power-grind mutants Burmese) emits crazed guttural bellowing and incomprehensible snarling, while the band trudges through a cacophonous assault of dissonant riffing that crashes into immense, subterranean doom-death heaviness. The mix of murky riffs and turbulent percussion churn together beneath a thick layer of hideous murk and squealing pinch harmonics, shifting back and forth between demolishing slower tempos and faster bursts of agitated thrash, peeling off into clashing clean chords that ring off into the ether. The band's faster songs like "Factory Reset Smile" and "Angles of El" further the violent, disorienting song structures, as that roiling chaos and sudden depth-charge blasts of doom-laden crush unfold into strange, complex forms. As the rest of the band hurtles into brutal disorder, Eliot's spiraling, slipper, spidery guitar work tumbles and scuttles across the thunderous rhythmic onslaught, with moments that are akin to hearing something from an old Skin Graft outfit slammed into a core of teeth-gnashing death metal. The overall feel balances lunatic barbarity and experimentation, which often evokes something like Dazzling Killmen, Craw, even Willpower-era Today Is The Day mercilessly colliding against 90s-era Gorguts or some other, more obscure tech-death abominations. But then there are the more sonically abstract tracks like "Black Hole Halo", which finds Mikey regurgitating an insane array of different vocal sounds over crackling electronic noise, echoing guitar noise and infernal drones, whispering and muttering and gurgling like something summoned out of the blackness by a Pretorian Resonator. And the final EP track "Profane Geometry" goes for hellish atmosphere as the vocals shift between baritone bellowing and blood-gargling roars, moving from the haunting moodiness of the first few minutes into even more jagged skronk-death that bursts with nutzoid shredding and weirdly majestic riffs. It's a killer finale to an already sickeningly schizoid, demented EP.

The Vile Vortices release features two ten-minute plus tracks on the B-side that explore even more experimental sides to Fastidium's sound. Entirely improvised and raw as fuck, "Dirty Glass Ceiling" and "Kept" are weird, mangled sprawls of freeform death metal , even more psychotic-sounding than the EP material as the band careens and staggers through ever-shifting riffscapes, percussive pandemonium and blood-curdling vocal glossolalia. The mix of grinding heaviness, lush guitar chords, and mathy fretboard madness continues to crawl over the wildly shifting time signatures, tempo changes, and knuckle-dragging breakdowns from the rhythm section, and Mikey's multi-pronged vocal attack reaches new levels of hysteria. The first track feels like heavily drug-damaged tech-death emerging from a state of Spare-style automatic writing, the cephalopodic riffs and leads unfurling out of the void right before your ears while those vocals (drenched in echo and delay for premium trippiness) rise and climb over the bizarre, increasingly psychedelic brutality like a shamanic delirium. Whacked-out chanting and droning groans hover over glacial skronked-out doomdeath, collapsing into a hallucinatory exhaustion. The other song "Kept" is nearly fourteen minutes of even stranger morbid shamble, an experimental free-form doom-death nightmare dredged out of the lower layers of the cerebral Styx, a hideous wallow through slow-motion horror and totally grotesque, malformed riffs, the rhythm section bulldozing through an increasingly psychedelic sludgefeast while the vocals veer from inhuman vomit to soul-shredding shrieks and even anguished singing. It's a twisted, adventurous, and anxiety-drenched sicko dirge, crushing and corroded, smeared in improvised shredding and massive tarpit heaviness. Almost closer to the stream-of-consciusness noise rock of early 90s Ramleh or Skullflower or the most dementia-afflicted AmRep skree, but drenched in putrid, puke-stained death metal and the glacial ultra-crush of stuff like Noothgrush and Leechmilk at their most raw, wrecked, and abject, eventually descending into a sprawl of lysergic creep.

In some ways, Fastidium's sound reminds me, in spirit as least, of the nightmarish blend of black/death and math-rock influences that Genevieve excels at. On the other hand, these guys are more hectic, knottier, trippier, and uglier, bringing a constant abrasive and assaultive energy to their experimental death metal. It's like something grotesquely deformed and eldritch that crawled out of an Oahuan lava tube.

The cassette from Crucial Blast comes with a digital download, features outstanding and appropriately surreal artwork from members John and Mikey, and is limited to one hundred copies.