- Melbourne threepiece Diploid must be one of the most prolific bands in Australian heavy music, with twelve releases in the last five years. Everything Went Red is the most recent, and while holding onto the intensity of earlier releases, it does take the band in a slightly new direction.

Last year’s Is God Up There? album concluded with the full recording of Jim Jones’ speech to his 900 doomed followers as they were about to drink lethal Kool-Aid in 1978. And this time Diploid seems to have again forsaken their good wholesome black metal inspired hardcore for an exploration of some of the darker corners of the human psyche.

The album starts with a slowed down voice sample – a man talking about trying to convince an unnamed woman to kill him. From there we go into a slow doomy first track and a cacophony of echoing voices which serve as an introduction to a seeming theme of mental illness.

As the album gets going into a mix of furious crust punk and crushing doom, little effects like disorienting voices and scuttling insect sounds are strewn through the background, creating a slightly unsettling atmosphere.

Halfway through the album, at the point where Severed veers between slow brooding hardcore, creepy echoed voices and blasts of extreme noise; Diploid turn a corner into territory we might call uneasy listening. And there they remain for the rest of the album.

Someone Has Their Eyes On Me, for example, is truly frightening in its menacing exploration of paranoia. Final track Nocturnal meanwhile goes from a swirl of creepy affected voices into soothing hypnotic static, to the return of the album introduction – this time a longer account of our narrator and his death wish.

With that the album is over. An intense, at times uncomfortable, twenty-seven minutes. We should applaud the band for branching out into new musical territories, but all in all I don’t think this is the Diploid record you will be putting on at your next party. In fact, at least for me personally, it’s hard to imagine what circumstances would make me really want to seek out the album’s second half for repeated listens. But if Diploid’s aim was, as I suspect, to evoke the unpleasant sensation of mental illness, then I suppose you could say they have succeeded.

- Andy Paine.