Apart from bestial black metallers, Deiphago, I can’t recall ever coming across any other metal bands from The Philippines. A quick search on Metal Archives provides a statistical reason: less than 200 bands with under 400 releases have ever come out of that region. Why so few metal bands exist in the world’s twelfth most populous country could be the subject of an entire other article, so I’m not going to go into that here. But, I think this context is worth mentioning in order to better appreciate Miscreants of Bloodlusting Aberrations, the second full-length album from Filipino four-piece, Pathogen.
While just now getting a proper CD release with worldwide promotion and distribution thanks to Dunkelheit Produktionen, this album was originally released on CD-r by the band and as a limited cassette pressing of 300 copies by French label, Satanized Productions, back in 2010, but it actually sounds about two decades older. A joint venture between Morbid Angel and Autopsy in the late ‘80s probably would’ve resulted in something like this with the thrashing of Altars of Madness plunging head-first into the pus-oozing riffs and guitar tone of Severed Survival. Even the vocal approach falls somewhere between early David Vincent and Chris Reifert. These influences are spread evenly throughout the album, which makes it a little samey overall, but provides variation within each track as they switch between neck-snapping aggression and mid-paced grooves built for satisfying headbanging. The raw production isn’t really a detriment for this style, but more bottom-end would’ve been nice.
It might be easy to assume that this is just another band jumping on the retro death bandwagon, but these guys have been plying their primitive wares since 2001, predating the old-school resurgence. Plus, their degree of sincerity makes them more than the sum of their influences, which also offer something a little different than that of most other nostalgic death worshippers who usually focus on early Entombed or Incantation.
In the time since this album was originally recorded, they released a third full-length that I haven’t heard, but read as being more raw and primitive. A fourth album is currently in the works that I hope expands upon the approach of this album with a stronger production and more varied songwriting. If they can do that, they will no longer be spoken of in terms of geography.
