Set your jpegs to maximum resolution folks because before we even think about using our ears near Contaminated's
Final Man we need to do some visual foreplay with that album cover in order to edge our imagination and get it wet enough to be penetrated. If excessive descriptions aren't your thing then you might want to look away now because as a veteran eyeball user I can tell you that what is depicted on the debut of these primitive death metallers is some kind of extremely cool and intricately deformed anthropomorphic mutant cyborg crustacean looking dude wading through raw murk in a cavernous apocalyptic voidscape. With the helpful additional context of the album name, consider the implications here: Is this thing the Final Man? Are there others? What does it want? Is it mad about being such a hideous freak? Can it feel any emotion at all? Does it want to kill? Or to be killed? Would death even provide salvation for such an affront to creation?
These questions linger as the album plays and image and sound snap together, presumably just like how that crab dude's gruesome stomach-jaw closes when your head is inside of it. Opener "Squalid Survival" wastes no time viciously spewing thick acrid tremolo riffs, relentless blast beats and wildly spraying cymbals. Speaking of spewing, the deep feral hollering of the vocalist will make it difficult for the listener not to vividly envisage the depraved state of grotesque regression that has befallen the
Final Man. Good luck deciphering any of the lyrics here other than maybe the track title being repeated in "No Time to Rot" - just as easy would be to interpret whatever clicks, slurps and hisses that loathsome mutant manages to utter as he shambles closer towards you. The album's production deserves fair credit, the tones are authentically disgusting and achieve an uncomfortable grimy immediacy without resorting to any contrived muddiness. The absurd blasts and fills from the drums sit relatively high in the mix and provide tireless buoyancy against the surge of filth.
Variation isn't exactly in abundance here but what matters is that there are a lot of good riffs as
Final Man sounds out the breadth of its cavernous genre, stopping just short of wearing entirely thin with a 34 minute run time. In terms of pacing, Contaminated do well to capitalise on that initial piquing of interest with the album art, reflecting its image with each withering riff. The almost-out-of-control sections of berserk tremming and blasting instill a feeling of desperate, degraded delirium; while the chugging breakdowns, doomy passages (and even a few chilling leads such as in "Mired in Shi
it") impart the sublime horror and loss that the last of a species would probably feel as it shuffles aimlessly through fetid desolation to a fate of lonely extinction. The listener too will feel like they are wading through that same cosmic sewage at the end of all human life, perhaps fleeing from that awful monstrous being... perhaps recognising themselves somewhere inside of it.
