Style: Progressive death metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Septicflesh, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Strapping Young Lad, Children of Bodom
Country: United States (NY)
Release date: 4 July 2025

What’s in a name? The walls of my music library are lined with bands whose creative output I passed over for years due to their terrible branding. Septicflesh, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Bedsore… the list goes on. I’ll never understand why so many good artists choose to debase their projects by naming themselves after bodily functions or necrotic diseases. While I may be more prudish than many in the metal scene (I judiciously save up swear words for special occasions and avoid them in everyday use), I’ve nonetheless learned that sometimes, you have to set aside preconceptions based on a band’s name, and let the music speak for itself. And who better to come gushing forth from the underground metal scene to help me enact this principle than the campily-named Pissectomy?

Setting aside for a moment the troubling medical implication of a pissectomy (where is the piss going? Does the procedure make you unable to piss, or does it cause a constant stream to be siphoned from your body?), Pissectomy’s name was clearly chosen for shock value. The band’s early output leaned into this, with deliberately subversive and urine-based lyrical themes and a sample-heavy, drugged-out noisegrind style. However, the adage of “let it mellow if it’s yellow” seems to have shaped Pissectomy’s style and restraint over time, as the latest record holds a surprising amount of refinement under the toilet-seat humour.

Pissectomy is nominally a one-man project helmed by Jason Steffen of New York and South Korea¹, but much of new release Electric Elephant Graveyard is brought to life by a cast of hired guns from Fiverr (an online marketplace for freelance service providers) and similar platforms, and the result is intriguingly genre-fluid. The first two tracks on the album are lavishly outfitted in sympho-death grandeur—think of the aforementioned Septicflesh or Fleshgod Apocalypse—but then the orchestra quietly slips out the back before the third track, “Sharkstar”, without so much as a tuba case banging against the doorframe on the way out. Save for a subtle reprise of some strings in album closer “Singularity”, the rest of the album relieves itself of symphonic elements, offering up riffs and licks galore with predominant influences from death metal titans like Cannibal Corpse and Children of Bodom, plus dashes of power, thrash, and prog.

For all of Pissectomy’s crude branding, Electric Elephant Graveyard is surprisingly restrained in its use of urinary humor, and it’s certainly not evident in the music itself. The tracks are layered, and even in a single offering like the seven-minute “Starstorm Omega”, multiple stylistic themes from fantastical power metal pomp to rhythmically itch-scratching, proggy helter-skelter are deployed thoughtfully. If you were not privy to Pissectomy’s subject matter, you could listen to almost the entire album without noticing any overt nephritics. Occasional lyrical groaners like “rest in piss” or “war and piss” are easy enough to miss. The jig is up, however, on the rather overtly-named “Pissrealm Antichrist”, where a layered vocal chorus repeatedly chants “all hail piss and shit”.

With Pissectomy’s freelanced cast of contributors, who exactly deserves credit for the various elements of Electric Elephant Graveyard is cloudy². The vocal duties, for instance, are shared between Steffen himself and at least one guest contributor, Topias Jokipii. Whatever the division of labour, the results are dynamic and versatile. There’s a simperingly evil D&D-grade sorcerer flavour to the spoken word on “Pissrealm Antichrist”, Cannibal Corpse-esque torridly deep pigsqueals on “Sharkstar”, and a gritty clean vocal refrain on “Sharkstar” that sounds like King Diamond pitched down an octave or so out of the screeching falsetto stratosphere. The guitar work, though, might just be number one. Steffen is clearly having a blast, and moments like the indulgently sprawling solo in “Welcome to Dead End” or the tightly coiled, chugging bursts on “Starstorm Omega” demonstrate equal parts laudable musicianship and clever composition.

While there is some level of tonal coherence across Electric Elephant Graveyard, as Pissectomy keeps up a steady flow of momentum, a clearer sense of identity would help the record to better coalesce. Pissectomy is a former noisegrind band blending elements of symphonic, power, death, thrash, and progressive metal into their sound. And while Steffen clearly has reverence for all of these genres, the crossing of the streams can be a bit much. There’s even an acoustic guitar interlude, “Astronomy”, which is lovely but lands rather disjointedly in the album’s entirety. Perhaps some of the vignette-based songwriting from Steffen’s noisegrind roots is hampering the development of a cohesive whole. The individual elements succeed, but a step back to take in the big picture across the album’s forty minutes could help everything stick together.

 If given ten guesses as to what a band named Pissectomy would sound like, I wouldn’t have come close. While I still wouldn’t rush to pop this album on the aux, Electric Elephant Graveyard’s balls-to-the-wall energy, as well as veneration for the various genres influencing Pissectomy’s sound, makes for a surprisingly charming listen. Sometimes, you have to be prepared to flush your assumptions down the drain.

Recommended tracks: Welcome to Dead End, Sharkstar, Singularity
You may also like: Shadecrown, Sigh
Final verdict: 6.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Instagram | Metal-Archives

Label: Independent

Pissectomy is:
– Jason Steffen (guitar, vocals)
– Topias Jokipii (vocals)
– People from Fiverr (other assorted instruments)

1. Steffen is currently stationed with the US military in South Korea as a fighter pilot. ︎
2. Like your pee might be if you’re dehydrated. ︎

The post Review: Pissectomy – Electric Elephant Graveyard appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: post-metal, sludge metal, shoegaze, noise rock, stoner rock, post-hardcore (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of:  Parannoul, Asian Glow, Neurosis, Boris
Country: South Korea
Release date: 15 May 2025

Modern medicine is amazing. People have lived well over a year with an artificial heart, and doctors can perform entire heart transplants. Alas, the human being still needs a heart, be it a machine or originally somebody else’s, and a person would wither and die almost instantly without the blood-pumping organ. South Korea’s Baan have a mission: rip out the still-beating heart from four genres and try to keep the result alive for sixty minutes. According to their Bandcamp, Baan aim to be “Doom but not boring / Screamo but not crying / Hardcore but not macho / Shoegaze but not sucks.” Dodging all four of those pitfalls while playing those genres is gonna require a musical miracle to occur on Neumann. Do Baan achieve what doctors cannot?

Let’s proceed one by one. Neumann certainly avoids the crying part of screamo by not being screamo beyond some halfheartedly shouted harsh vocals; the record also contains some amateur cleanly sung, crowd-chant adjacent cleans. Both vocal styles are completely obliterated by the mix to the point of being nearly inaudible—they may have recorded them from across the street—rendering them a strident nuisance. Similar to the self-described “screamo” aspect of Baan’s sound, the macho part of hardcore, by virtue of mostly avoiding true punkiness, is eschewed by Baan. Those two soul-of-the-genre omissions are cheating, though, and Neumann is really post-y, noisy, atmospheric sludge metal, with the atmospheric part coming from shoegaze and stoner rock influence.

Thankfully, the doom metal (read: sludge and post- metal) parts are not boring, and the shoegaze aspect don’t sucks [sic]! Fuzzed out guitars and Baan’s love of noisy amplifiers drive Neumann, and the South Korean band have a keen ear for melody and rhythm, with wistful yet hard-hitting guitar parts and dynamic, Mastodon-esque drumming. “Birdperson 새사람” has the first shoegaze part around 3:40 with airy guitars above pummeling double bass, but it’s not until the second track “Early Bird Dies Fast” where Baan hit their stride, the spacey trem picking of the simultaneously woolly yet shimmery guitars playing a beautiful tune—almost nostalgic in tone, as if Astronoid wrote stoner doom. The strongest asset in the band’s arsenal, however, is their weaponization of noise, with exemplary moments like the middle breakdown of “Sing a Brave Song 2 씩씩한 노래를 불러라 2” and the sludgy violence of “Reversal of a Man.” The bass playing is also killer, but unfortunately it almost never makes an appearance with the exception of “Sing a Brave Song 1 씩씩한 노래를 불러라 1” where it gets significant time leading. 

Despite the strength of the riffs and drumming, the album wears itself thin within forty minutes, the schtick played out. By the end of the three-part “Sing a Brave Song 씩씩한 노래를 불러라,” I’m snoozing at the prospect of more Baan, and the boring track “Not Yet” contributes nothing that previous songs like “Histrionic” hadn’t done better. Moreover, the closer, “Oldman 헌사람,” plays into a tedious atmospheric intro that lasts for several minutes before recapping with uninspired shoegaze vocals from Asian Glow; so, I’m forced to admit that while the shoegaze instrumental sections don’t sucks, the shoegaze vocals sucks. Baan clearly had fun tinkering with their amplifiers and jamming out—at the expense of a more concise, better album. 

South Korea is truly a hotbed for noisy, homemade shoegaze recently (Parannoul, Asian Glow, Huremic), and Baan have certainly made a name for themselves with the release of Neumann. Their mix of energetic, growly, and fuzzy guitar tones with passionate and delicate melodies contributes something new to their scene. The band just needs an editor and a better singer. But fans of everything from post-metal to punk will find something to enjoy in Neumann—I certainly did.

Recommended tracks: Early Bird Dies Fast, Histrionic, Sing a Brave Song 1-3 씩씩한 노래를 불러라 1-3
You may also like: Meth., The Angelic Process, Glassing, Huremic, Sadness
Final verdict: 6/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram

Label: independent

Baan is:
반재현 [Baan Jae-hyun]
김진규 [Kim Jin-gyu aka April 28th]
이성재 [Lee Seong-jae]
장진웅 [Jang Jin-ung]

The post Review: Baan – Neumann appeared first on The Progressive Subway.