Harvest of the Killing Fields

Trichomoniasis is the duo of Faustino Rodriguez (drums) and Hunter Petersen (everything else). Their first two releases — a 2018 self-titled EP and 2019’s Terminal Inversion — were fairly straightforward brutal death metal, all low-slung riffs, blasting drums, and indecipherable gurgled vocals. On 2023’s Makeshift Crematoria, though, they upped their game by getting weirder. Rodriguez began employing a sharp, ringing snare sound, and Petersen’s guitars were less riff-based and more about creating a continuous lava flow of noise, occasionally interrupted (as on “Predacious Stylet”) by abstract, sci-fi synth noises. Harvest Of The Killing Fields is their greatest achievement (for admittedly unorthodox values of both “great” and “achievement”) to date. At this point, their music retains the sonic signatures of death metal’s most unpalatable extremes (distorted guitars, machine-gun drums, guttural vocals), but the actual song structures have more in common with noise-rock or free jazz than metal. In fact, Trichomoniasis have been cited as important movers within the so-called “free death” subgenre, and that’s not hard to understand if you listen carefully. Rodriguez’s playing on tracks like “Cryptic Lineages” and “Everted Proboscis” seems to owe as much to Rashied Ali as to Dave Lombardo, and Petersen’s guitar riffs often seem to be disintegrating as they go. The vocals, too, are more warped than ever before, fed through electronics until they recall Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers at his most unhinged and demonic. This is music built to disorient and overwhelm; it’s impossible to imagine anyone headbanging, throwing the horns, or even moshing to it. But Rodriguez and Petersen deliver with meticulous craft and implacable self-confidence, so accept their compositional and stylistic ground rules and you’ll see them for the artists they are.