Sinister Monstrosities… is Oxygen Destroyer’s second LP, and the Seattle-based band has been releasing songs like “Summoning the Moth of Divinity” and “Vanquished by the Unrelenting Devastation of the Celestial Behemoth” over a run of splits and EPs since 2015. This new record presents a modest innovation, in that Oxygen Destroyer has moved beyond the Toho Studios canon to create songs based on British and American movies: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), The Giant Claw (1957) and Gorgo (1961). Sometimes the songs’ subjects are pretty clear, and sometimes it takes a particular sort of proficiency to recognize them. “Enduring the Maternal Rage of the Amphibious Monstrosity” doesn’t quite identify its titular “monstrosity,” but if you are familiar with the narrative of Gorgo, you can see the pissed-off mama beast coming from some distance away. She is certainly big enough. 

Some folks will hear only silliness, a superficial lite-ness in those musical antics, which might issue in summary judgment on Oxygen Destroyer. The source material doesn’t always help. As Toho Studios cranked out Godzilla movie after Godzilla movie, the proceedings got increasingly goofy: the pint-sized sirens in the Mothra movies, the appearance of Minilla in Son of Godzilla (1967) and Destroy All Monsters (1968) and so on. One answer to that ludicrousness is Oxygen Destroyer’s music, which is tightly written and executed, and bursting with aggressivity. The band glories in the excesses of Kaiju mythos, but the songs don’t play around. They’re loud, thrashy and excoriating. And we should recall that the culture that created Gojira, featuring a city-burning creature birthed by nuclear radiation, was fewer than ten years removed from the horrors of Hiroshima, and of Nagasaki. Unfathomable ignorance of humankind? The reverberations of the explosions of Fat Man and Little Boy are always embedded somewhere in Godzilla’s roar — and they’re somewhere in these songs, too. 

You may demur: Is Elon Musk doing shitty? What about the reactionary forces busily crafting still more legislation to make reproductive health services even harder to access, throughout bigger and bigger swaths of the States? What about the Lockheed Martin corporation, which likely sees the war in Ukraine through a very distinct set of frames? Are they doing shitty? Depends on how you hear and think the “doing”: if you aren’t suffering or wavering on the verge of enraged breakdown, you’re likely doing some shit — or you’re consuming and living in a way that’s just fine with all the shit being done daily to billions of people. If so, the third song on Determined to Rot is for you. “Smashed by a Slab of Concrete” moderates the pace of things just a bit, sounding like a mudslide’s obliterating run down a hillside. Here’s hoping there are multiple Teslas in its path. 

Too much? Then this record — and sublimely aggro songs like “Blood Machine” and “Shitted (Out)” (best use of parentheses so far this year…)  —are not for you. To be sure, there is not a mass audience for music of this sort. But Mutilatred has some company in the coterie of caveman death metal recently established in Ohio. Guitarist Drew Arnold also plays in Columbus’s Sanguisugabogg, a band that shares the obscene, sophomoric sensibility of Cleveland’s 200 Stab Wounds. Those bands’ songs inevitably combine an appetite for gore with moronic representations of sexual violence: “Dick Filet,” “Felching Filth,” “She Was Already Dead,” “Itty Bitty Pieces.” It’s all engineered for maximum, puerile shock, songs that are determined to offend. 

Determined to Rot supplies a surfeit of shock, but Mutilatred chooses music as the affect’s vector. There are no sound clips from interviews with serial killers, no ostensibly titillating titles signaling creepy libidinal excitements. Just elemental, visceral rage, tempered with a strange reflexivity. See “Eroded Brain,” “Sickened to Death” and the title track. The participial adjectives seem to turn the violence back on the lyric speakers; it’s the band, standing in for all of us, that is “eroded” and “sickened” and “determined” to follow the logic of the death drive. This reviewer can dig it. 

Most of Mutilatred’s music has all the subtlety of a baseball-bat beatdown on parking-lot asphalt. But they can craft a somewhat more complex experience when they wish. Check out the record’s title track. After two-and-a-half minutes of the band’s standard tactics, the riffs and drumkit battery drop out, and a weird, blipping, droning slurry of sound engulfs the song. It feels distant and simultaneously enveloping. The band allows the muddy electronics to linger for over three minutes, and while the strange cascade doesn’t have a set pattern, there’s a sort of rhythm to it. It’s transfixing. Just when you have sunk into the mood and given yourself over to its dissolution (and its incipient sense of rot), Mutilatred kicks back into full roar, with a crunching, sludgy riff. It would be cathartic if it weren’t so ruthlessly ugly, but the band likely has no interest in cleansing, or in emotionally uplifting deliverance. Determined to Rot drags you back down into the shit. At least you’ll have lots of company.