June 12, 2025

Album Review - Lipoma "No Cure for the Sick"

You don’t choose to listen to goregrind as much as it chooses you as a listener. It’s a subgenre of metal so cutthroat and uncompromising that it’s primarily enjoyed by people who are cutthroat and uncompromising about art. Melodic death metal is the opposite. It’s literally the most accessible extreme metal can get. There is no overlap whatsoever between the fanbase, but Lipoma, the one man project of a man named Max Pierce (who has another band awesomely called Boar Taint), plays an unsettling hybrid of both.

I’m not saying it makes total sense because it doesn’t and I don’t think it’s supposed to, but Lipoma’s new album is sure worth listening to solely based on the fact that you’ve never listened to anything even remotely close.

No Cure for the Sick is eleven tracks of what I’d mostly consider melodic death metal, except played with blast beats, lo-fi production, and pitch-shifted goregrind vocals. I say “mostly” because it also flirts with power metal in weird, fluffy, synth-driven moments that feel like they wandered in from an entirely different album and just never left.

If that sounds like something Phyllomedusa might slap together in 24 hours between amphibian-themed EPs, you’re not wrong. But Lipoma isn’t just throwing shit at the wall for shock value. No Cure for the Sick feels like an exploration of contradiction itself. An unholy collision between goregrind and melodeath, mapped out by an ultraviolent Christopher Columbus with tinnitus and a fixation on autopsy reports.

There is one proper goregrind song on No Cure for the Sick called Cellular Destruction in the Drama of Life, which acts both as a palate cleanser and a tonal linchpin for the record with its lengthy, histrionic sample. It’s the only track I’d confidently call pulverizing, mostly thanks to Pierce’s shameless use and abuse of drum machines.

But even this track isn’t without melody. Not in the Dark Tranquillity sense anyway. This isn’t soaring, Scandinavian melancholy. The riffs here are sharp, but the melodic undercurrent has a warped, cinematic quality. It’s eerie. Ghoulish, even. Like the soundtrack to a horror movie no studio had the guts to finish.

The Sea Surgeon sounds like a Castlevania boss fight reinterpreted by an alligator with a MIDI keyboard: galloping guitar riffs, gothic organs, and relentless blast beats. It’s one of the most effective genre collisions on No Cure for the Sick, a track that somehow sounds like goregrind and melodic death metal at the exact same time… while also sounding like neither. It’s something else entirely. Something new. Something wrong (in the best way possible).

Then there’s the single, Glory to the Blade which leans harder into that Gothenburg melodeath sound if Gothenburg had been relocated into the abdominal cavity of a rotting ogre. Think old-school In Flames, but with vocal tracks that got corrupted in transit. Nowhere near my favorite song on the record, but it explores different angle of this goregrind-infused melodeath infatuation.

Speaking of favorites, Incurable Wounds might be the album’s most seamless and strangest fusion of genres. It leans on drum machines not just for brutality, but for atmosphere, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write about goregrind. The riffs are absurdly catchy without ever being showy. The melodies are bare but effective, folding into the inhuman, machine-gun precision of the blast beats like they were grown in the same petri dish.

Flesh of the Damned, on the other hand, opens with a borderline flowery intro, like something from a forgotten Euro power metal band, but then plunges headfirst into a lean, effective goregrind assault. And just when you think it’s done, it rides out on a classic heavy metal riff like the closing credits of a splatter film scored by Quiet Riot. It’s atypical to say the least, but it works.

The rest of No Cure for the Sick veers way deeper into what I can only describe as “crazy Luca Turilli riff” territory. And as much as I admire the mad scientist energy at play here, some of it feels like ingredients that don’t emulsify. Like mixing raw eggs and orange juice. Technically edible, but nobody’s asking for a second glass.

Remedies of Pagan Medicine is uncomfortably groovy and just awkward enough to make you self-conscious about enjoying it. It has a fun, dissonant bridge, sure, but it also feels like a song that’s halfway through a genre identity crisis. And then there’s Psalms of Psoriasis (side note: why do goregrind bands always write about psoriasis?). The riffs here don’t have much bite. They feel like deconstructed boss battle music from a Japanese action game that was too weird to localize. I get that this album is an exercise in extremes and experimentation, but some ideas land like late-stage test tube failures.

I’m not going to deep-dive into the rest. You get the point. No Cure for the Sick is, spiritually, a goregrind release. Somewhere between shitposting and a hypercaffeinated brainstorming session accidentally caught on tape. And despite what your teenage years might’ve taught you about mixing weird stuff together (Ranch Doritos and José Cuervo tequila do not cancel each other out), it’s worth listening to at least once as a creative exercise. Maybe even twice, if you want to hear what melodic death metal sounds like when it’s duct-taped to a centrifuge.

Some of these songs are legitimately the most unhinged melodic death metal I’ve heard since the heyday of Intestine Baalism. And whether that sounds like a threat or a compliment probably tells you everything you need to know about whether this album is for you.

Album Review - Lipoma "No Cure for the Sick"

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