Besides the release of a demo (in 2008), the EP Heartworm is the sole official recording by Italian five-piece Dementia Senex (line-up: bass player Federico Cucchi, drummer Mattia Bagnolini, guitarists Filippo Merloni and Marco Righetti, and singer Cristian Franchini). However, despite a limited discography, they were able to perform live on stage with great bands such as Ulcerate, Fuck The Facts, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Svart Crown or Mouth Of The Architect, amongst others.
Enter 2012, and Dementia Senex start recording this three-track EP. The lengthy opening track Unscented Walls (eight minutes) shows what this band stands for: creating a massive mixture of sludgy Death Metal and slow Post-Hardcore. It’s highly variating in several aspects. The song starts slow and sludgy, but after two minutes the whole turns into a fast and technical monster with discordant riffs and hypnotic leads. Then, after about four minutes, the assault gets suddenly interrupted by a very short acoustic intermezzo, before returning to the initial Doom-Sludge-Death majesty. I listened to this specific track (and both others) several times, but each time I am surprised by this multi-layered result. Oh yes, I didn’t even mention the vocals, but what if I would define it as a mixture of Martin van Drunen, Karl Willets and John Tardy? Next comes Kairos, which is a short (2:29) but right-in-your-face piece of highly melodic and ultra-powerful grimness. Heartworm finally is even more technical and experimental than the opening track, with lots of breaks and tempo-changes, magisterial structured yet sometimes dissonant riffs, a monolithic rhythm section, eccentric and mesmerizing leads, additional semi-spoken vocals, and a fabulous slower trem-passage as from half of the track.
My opinion: it is extremely rare to find such an organically executed symbiosis of melody and rudeness; it is quasi unexisting to have such naturally sounding mixture of (Traditional) Tech-Death Metal and Post-Metal / Sludge; it is quasi incomprehensible to find a sound so refined and at the same time, so raw and harsh. Yet in those three cases, Dementia Senex seem to succeed with grandeur. On top of it, all three of the songs, the short one included, are written with mastership, and performed with craftsmanship, and therefore I cannot but end with: !!!