Kev Rowland Lord Mantis had actually split up following the death of drummer/founder Bill Bumgardner, but vocalist/bassist Charlie Fell and guitarist/vocalist Andrew Markuszewski decided get things going again. Guitarist Ken Sorceron of Abigail Williams had been a member on their last album ‘Death Mask’, and they also brought back honorary vocalist/member Dylan O’Toole of Indian as well as a new drummer in Bryce Butler. I have been reading various reviews about this album online, and they all seem to give it universal acclaim, so it is fairly obvious I am missing something as to me this fails on most accounts.

To describe this music is to say they have brought together elements of sludge, doom and black metal and produced something which to my mind manages to miss the highlights of any of those genres. I can understand what they are trying to achieve, but it is rare indeed that it actually accomplishes anything of note. There are bits and pieces here and there where the light shines on what is otherwise an impenetrable mess, but the fans seem to like it. They are trying to blend together very different styles indeed and move from one extreme to another without ever really capturing any solid ideas or anything different. There is just nothing here for me to get excited about and while it isn’t an awful record there isn’t actually contained within it that makes me want to play it more than I have had to so I could write about it and I am fairly confident I will never play it again.

Triceratopsoil Pervertor is an album that's all over the place, in a good way. At its core we have a sort of avant-garde sludge, but with a healthy dose of death and black metal elements. Gritty downtuned guitars, albeit more articulate than standard fare for the genre, grinding out groovy midtempo riffs while the bass and drums pummel your skull through the floor and a man shrieks about things that are against my religion to repeat. This album truly sounds the way its album art looks: dark, creepy and probably evil. Not for the faint of heart.

Overall, very impression composition skills on display, as the tracks ebb and flow with smooth and dynamic shifts. Nothing sounds out of place, as if the whole thing could have easily been merged into one epic track. The production and tones are absolutely perfect. The Whip and the Body is an incredible finisher to a brilliant album, that manhandles and marches us out of here, with a hypnotic repetitiveness that is almost Krautrock-like - not that Krautrock ever sounded like this. The last two and a half minutes of Pervertor make me want to instantly start it again from the beginning.

siLLy puPPy Drawn to the album cover like a swarm of flies drawn to a freshly deposited pile of crap on the ground, i was mesmerized by the grotesque and admittedly over-the-top sacrilegious nature of the artwork. LORD MANTIS is a blackened sludge metal act that has arisen from Chicago, IL and unleashed their second album PERVERTOR onto the world in 2012. While black and sludge certainly have their role in this filthy and raw metal, there are elements of industrial and doom that all gestate together to create this magnificent maggot of metal that sounds fairly unique as heart immediately upon the very first hate-filled track “Perverter Of The Will.” And indeed with this band that contains members from Von and Nachmystium does indeed deliver the goods that match the hideous album cover on display. Subject matter includes everything from good old fashioned murder to pedophilia and other perversions such as the glorification of everything filth and indecent.

On the musical side, they take the thick atmospheric approach of certain strains of black metal and marry them with the intense chugging riffing of bands like Meshuggah all the while giving the larger than live and somewhat epic metal music a nice gritty sludge makeover all the while the percussive drumming churns out violent and brutal off-kilter timed beats that range from cozy creepy accompaniments to the spastic and brutal occasional drum roll. Thus the metal can have a monotonous and baleful groove with true tortured vocals of Charlie Fell that exhibit an impressive range as far as extreme metal goes and often remind me of a combo of Vektor and Marilyn Manson. The tempos range from slightly above the mid range that feel like a death march into the abyss to the extremely frenetic as heard on “At The Mouth” which sounds like a diseased animal out on the hunt in the darkened moonless night.

The brilliance of PERVERTOR is more its restraint rather than its outpouring of excesses as many an extreme metal band can deliver too many goods too quickly and ruin the overall delivery of the effect that they are striving to achieve. With this behemoth of a blackened atmospheric sludge attack, riffs are aggressive but conservative. Additional guitar parts are used sparingly and in key moments as to heighten a desired effect. Likewise with the percussion as it chugs along in tandem with the overall theme and serves as bombastic intensifier without deserting its duties for its own personal conquest. Everything here just works. The song structures are strong. The individual musical parts are perfectly woven together to create the perfect gorefest of doomy blackened sludge metal with just enough atmospheric touches to keep the aggressive metal from spiraling into generic and stale turf while delivering a nice production that feels modern yet keeping it all raw and filthy.