Connecticut was where I ended up this past weekend after much back and forth indecisiveness. A familiar enough setting by now, I can even navigate around Wallingford without a map, which came in handy when for the third time (here’s the second) I stopped in at Red Scroll Records on North Colony and hit their precariously positioned used rack to see what I could find. Of note, they had both Croatan‘s Curse of the Red Queen and Soulpreacher‘s Sonic Witchcraft, which I picked up in Maryland at SHoD X, and there were a couple other points of interest along the way, but what I ended up leaving with, paramount in the haul, was Lamentations by UK epic doomers Solstice and Suspect Symmetry by Ontario sludge-grinders Buried Inside.

I’ll be honest, I almost didn’t buy the latter. After reviewing their latest record earlier in the year I barely listened to it, and Suspect Symmetry didn’t seem to justify my $7.50, but curiosity won out, and since this was the record that ostensibly got them signed to Relapse, I figured it was at least worthy of hearing. And yeah, I guess it was.

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Tradition and fascist madman/$20 bill model Andrew Jackson hold that the spoils go to the victor, and it seems Ottawa‘s intensely atmospheric metallers Buried Inside agree; new album Spoils of Failure (Relapse Records) is a dark, bleak and oppressive work the emphasis of which seems to be on embodying the titular failure in a bizarrely successful way. Another longtime dictum is that artists can never succeed, only fail better. If that’s the case — and I wholeheartedly believe it is — then Buried Inside fail pretty damn well here.

A lyrical treatise focused on the flaws of the society which is apparently crumbling all around us more every day, Spoils of Failure provides the kind of vague and poetic analysis that could either be brilliant or pointless depending on how much thought you want to put into reading it. That’s not to call the lyrics dumb, if anything they’re over-intellectualized, but as much of a focus as there is on verbiage, you can enjoy the record without knowing the words. Hell, I did until I looked at the liner notes. It can happen.

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