Cleric recorded Regressions in Queens, New York, with producer Colin Marston. The music was recorded at The Thousand Caves, Marston's studio, and tracked guitar, drums, and bass simultaneously to reel-to-reel tape. In contrast to the rest of the album, the music that "The Fiberglass Cheesecake" comprises was assembled in the studio rather than performed, making it difficult to reproduce in a live setting. In crafting the track the band utilized a sound replacer, recording drummer Larry Kwartowitz using his hands to play a part on his lap and then replacing the sounds of his hands with drums. Marston commented on the album's recording process in an interview with American Aftermath: "Regressions by Cleric took waaaaaay longer than any other record I’ve ever worked on. It’s also probably the most dense in terms of the sheer number and complexity of layers being heard at any given time."
Music
Regressions' sound is a complex and dense mixture of grindcore and doom metal with experimental leanings that touch on drone, noise and ambient music. In describing the band's sound, Philip Montoro of the Chicago Reader said "the music this Philadelphia four-piece plays is a kind of metal the way Lost Highway is a kind of movie. It's an elastic tissue of creepy electronic noise and barely human screaming, impregnated with patches of riff-salad grind and hypercube mathcore." The opener "Allotriophagy" is the lengthiest track on the album at nineteen minutes and twenty-three seconds. It was originally recorded for the band's 2006 demo EP of the same name. It begins with a brief segment of ambient sounds before launching into an aggressive grindcore performance. It then slowly unravels into drone music, which is overtaken by Middle Eastern tinged vocals and rhythms.
Critical reception
Regressions garnered favorable reviews from music critics, primarily for its aggressive and experimental nature. Keith Carman of Exclaim! called it "progressive, vitriolic and overwhelming", further stating that "essentially, within any given song, one hears the detonation of Pig Destroyer, adrenaline of Converge, creative technicality of Nomeansno and Psyopus, outright weirdness of Fantômas uniting with P.I.L.'s Flowers of Romance and creepiness of, well, not much is creepier than hearing tribal rhythms clashing with banshee wails and thundering guitar." In writing for PopMatters, Ron Hart credited the band with being "unrelenting in their aspirations to spill the doom metal blood all over Brian Eno’s Green World, a feat they succeed at quite excellently across this ten-song, 76-minute epic of an album."
