Going Dutch: D-Compose

D-Compose
Ancestral Inhuman Thoughtless
Extreme Terror
2004
Ancestral Inhuman Thoughtless is a slow burn of an album. D-Compose don’t really hit their stride until the latter half of this EP, which rocks the same pestilential low end that festers under Maruta. “Redemption” and “Kill Yourself Now” work the same blood splattered back alleys prowled by Crowpath with sludgey undertow riffs that suck you into a soup of filth and disease. “Redemption,” in particular, ends with the sound of a torture session that makes you question just how D-Compose expect you to be redeemed.
Unlike many of their hit it and quit it countrymen, these Holland-based multinational collective bring longer songs with an American hardcore vibe akin to Phobia’s Return to Desolation. While not as strong as that stone classic, D-Compose are not afraid to stretch grind’s attention-starved strictures in favor of lengthier tunes and quirky treatments like the almost industrial electro-beast stalking of “Maltreat Yourself” or Voivodian astral projection of “Insanity of Mankind,” which buzzes like nest of hornets with PMS. As a bonus, D-Compose throws in an almost unrecognizable deconstruction of the Ramones’ “I Am Not Jesus” that’s reassembled as a rolling death metal monstrosity that blends perfectly with D-Compose’s own corpus.
Ancestral Inhuman Thoughtless is by no means a perfect album. It’s plagued by a rather over-loud snare that goes at your temples like Woody Woodpecker on bathtub meth, for one thing, but even when they explode in their face, D-Compose’s experiments are consistently intriguing.