Marcid – Chlorinate (Review)

“Chlorinate”

Marcid

(a review)

by Dominic Zinampan

In aspiring to coalesce shoegaze, dream pop, screamo, and grunge, Dumaguete-based Marcid occupies an increasingly broadening interstice of genres. In the course of twelve tracks, the four-piece, in their tour-de-force of a debut titled Chlorinate (2024), articulates and amalgamates altered states, inner turbulence, and ethereal soundscapes.

Characteristic of genres such as shoegaze, the elusiveness of dreams continues here to mesmerize and captivate the imagination. The album evokes not only the affects of dreams but its logic as well—how incongruous sensations, moods, and other elements melt into one mass before morphing into another assemblage. This is evident in how the band balances out their predilection towards the lethargic with an equal propensity for the propulsive, as shimmering timbres are often coupled with seismic rhythms, or how the texture of a strained throat is made to pierce, dissolve, and seep into a blanket of fuzzed-out guitars. Throughout the album, Marcid shows agility in tinkering around with contrasting weights, densities, speeds, and intensities, sustaining the tension that arises from such disjunctions yet instinctively knowing when to shift from glacial atmospheres to explosive fury. 

Chlorinate dazzles with its seamless alchemy of textures, distilling and crystallizing disparate tendencies into one potent, radiant concoction that fluidly oscillates between the colossal and the torrential.