Archives: Reviews

1 - Self-Butchery 2 - Perpetual Breeders 3 - Blood Addiction... 4 - Feasting on Human Components 5 - Obsede 6 - L.I.F.E.

Montreal’s Agony are one of those groups whose name was lost somewhere between the paragraphs of fanzines and the faded memories of old Canadian headbangers. There was however a consistent potential in this band which I sense was somewhat never exploited in its entirety. While maintaining the convulse national proficiency to create progressive and interesting music while keeping it all the way brutish and uneasy, there was something inexorably mssing between these lines. But to ignore them is a crime, becouse hear this stuff and let me know if this band didn’t have the same imprint of Cryptopsy, Kataklysm, Blood of Christ, Hidden Pride and all these vibrantly insane bands (not to mention a sick logo, I just love it). My feeling towards this band is that is had definitely something more and all the while something less than its countrymates. It had an ability to create remotely sad, placid soundscapes and melodic riffs and glue them to heavy brutal death breakdowns, bombastic bass slapping and irreverent music destruction a la Human Remains all the while remaining coherent and not sounding pretentious. The progression this band made since their demo tape can be sampled here becouse this latter is included as bonus at the end of track six in this Cd, which turns out to be almost 45 minutes long, so you basically have a Cd which is twice as long as a modern Death Metal full-length (myseries of the world globalization). The music follows very clearly a definite if broken path, becoming rougher and more extreme as we approach the end of the recording. I just love this production, just like I said for Cryptopsy, I feel this is the correct one for Death Metal, with a warm sound and an extremely wooden sounding snare. The patterns followed along its length are spastic but not as frantic as those of modern day post-core bands, which allow the whole music to set on denser, more brutal sonorities; we have a couple of different vocal styles, from inhuman screams to grunts, and a good share of melodic bridges as well, shattered in a multitute of rainbow hued riffs and blurry percussions. The bass is still very high in the mix but this style relies very much on the drum-bass rhytmic chemistry to add a framented feel to the music, it’s just a trademark. I just enjoyed Agony, in all its lunacy. And the cover is beautiful too, blurry and nightmarish, somehow reminiscent of H.R. Giger’s works. The layout too, follows the unfathomably colorful putridity of the music. Good lyricstoo, while not outstanding.

1 - Defenestration 2 - Abigor 3 - Open Face Surgery 4 - Serial Messiah 5 - Born Headless 6 - Swine of the Cross 7 - Gravaged (a Cryptopsy) 8 - Memories of Blood 9 - Mutant Christ 10 - Pathological Frolic

Cryptopsy‘s fire has burned out fast in me, in a matter of just a few years. But its flames had been high for their short lifespan, fuck! I ordered this Cd straight from Invasion* after hearing “Gentle Exhumation” (the demo tape) and whoah, I never thought a band could play so fast, I never heard blasts this fast since Brutal Truth‘s “Extreme Conditions”! This shit was completely out of mind! Even better than the first tape, for sure. Since then, my idea of Canda’s headfucked creativity was real high, starting out with Voivod (which were a BIG favorite of mine and I still think they have been more or less always good to hear) and up to the incredible Kataklysm first MCd and debut. But when I heard this Cd things really seemed to shoot skywards, it’s just so fucking pissed off and schizophrenic it was a defining moment in Death Metal freakiness. Majestic in its insanity. True madness made not only real, but also a turned into a common paragon for a whole new style. It was more or less the time where a lot of weird things started to happen up there with bands like Necrotic Mutation, Putricid, Decerebration, Pandemic Infection (cool demo), Agony (this one was GOOD), Gorelust… but the insanity seeped downwards as well in the States with small jewels like Undertaker, Skeleton of God, Wicked Innocence, Cephalic Carnage and basically the whole Creepo crew… I am in the mood of hearing this kind of pissed off stuff lately so here you go, I’m going to review a couple of schizoid classics in the following days. Fuck off. And where better to start than with this huge record? With my first words I meant that I completely lost interest in Cryptopsy after buying “None So Vile”. I gave “Whisper Supremacy” a listen or two but I wasn’t very much into Di Salvo’s vocals. It was just a matter of personal taste becouse Cryptopsy’s music is so unique you could basically throw any kind of vocals in the mix and they will probably work, but I just found the vocals on this album way more varied, more brutal, and fucking crazier. Hear what this guy does to his throat on “Memories of Blood”. I read he also used to do some tricks with earthworms on stage but I cannot remember well (I just remember one episode when the drummer passed out at a Milwaukee Metal fest, becouse the place was so hot and they had to play FASTER than on this album, so go figure). In any case, it’s always a pity when you lose a personality like this in change for some more standard stuff. Other than for the vocals, things started losing the Death Metal sound more and more, the sound become so clean, the technical tricks so prominent, it lead me to forget about Cryptopsy for several years. But it is always great to hear this one. For one, I LOVE the sound on this release. People complaining about it are fucking faggots and they know nothing of the Death Metal sound, fucking cunts. “Blasphemy Made Flesh” is already a technical monstrosity, but the sound here is that of a totally Death Metal album, with all his imprecisions and filth. The sound of the snare drum is fantastic, like it’s just a block of wood instead of a skin, the guitars are down tuned and fat, the vocals exploring a wicked range of raspy screams, grunts, squeals as if they were just another instrument per se, the vocal chords squeezed and hammered like those of an exotic musical instrument. The bass might be a bit over the top, with slapping so loud it almost drown everything beneath, but it just contributes to the frantic feel of the whole album. The arrangements are the very best thing however, and what makes this band so singular: the riffs are just scrambled in a big cauldron and scattered in a nonsensical pattern, but somewhere in the mix, you can hear there is some alien intelligence overseeing the works, even if a deranged one. The drums, well we know that, this band coined the term hyperblast, so you can figure how varied and fast they can be, they’re just unbelievable. I am very pissed off becouse somewhere in these years this Cd must have been in contact with water and a good share of its pages are now glued together (grr), but most of the lyrics can still be read. They’re some sort of cross between poetic and serial killer stuff. Just as impossible to pigeonhole as the rest of the music, but great. I was tempted to buy either the Displeased or Century Media reissue but I am not sure if the booklet is exactly the same (and anyway I’d keep it for personal affection). This one has a nice gold pantone logo on top of an amazingly insane painting of a misshaped monstrosity with insect legs and a huge central eye lying in the middle of an ocean, with icebergs all around it, carved with monster visages. How it perfectly fits the concept! This is a big classic, even by today’s standards.

* I also have an interview I made with Invasion records made around those years, I shall publish it one day if I find the letter.

1 - Psychoanalysis 2 - Mix 106.Fuck You 3 - Tuol Sleng 4 - Dream of Death 5 - The Only Way to Get to Know Jesus is to Get on Your Knees 6 - From the Outside In 7 - Cunt Struck 8 - Hatred 9 - Hollow 10 - Threat Remains 11 - Suffocating

Hey this cadaver on the cover must be today’s big favourite becouse this is the third time I see it appearing in all its adipocere coated ugliness in just a few months (namely Bitch Infection and Putrescence debuts) before seeing it reappear on this Sordid album, eh. Anyway cadavers are always cooler than metal chairs in a empty room, fractal lights or policemen beating punks. So for me go for it if you want to reuse this again, ah ah. The layout looks a bit weird but it’s not bad in the end, if a bit too glossy. Lyrics span also every topic from iconoclasm to visions of armageddon, social problems, sexual abuse, introspection, you name it; things are not incredibly clear here. But they say what’s important is the music, as usual, and from this angle the style is clearly defined. The overall sound here is just fantastic, with a incredibly dry, loud snare drum and a extremely rough edge on the sound of the guitars; add a double level old school growling vocal approach, and short to the point songs to the mix and you get something close to this. I won’t say that Sordid has inherited all the dissonance of first generation post-punk noise-grind, but I am very happy that they also stand far from today’s trend of writing neat, atonal sharp riffs with pissed off screams a la Discordance Axis or Agoraphobic Nosebleed. This is more like rough, shitty, natural grindcore and I love it this way, ugly, instinctive and pointless. These strings are pulled as to make maximum noise, and not just to create cowboy grooves or some breed of northern European crust, which is also just a turn on. This is a non-standard yet old fashioned grind massacre, always welcome!

1 - Back From The Dead 2 - The Elder Race 3 - Bitterness And Hatred 4 - Black Edifice 5 - Divine In Agony 6 - Hear My Screams 7 - Sealed In Blood 8 - Dream Death

I had this album on tape for so long that I completely forgot about it until I saw it was going to be repressed by New Renaissance, and I have been FAST to get my hands this, eh. I don’t know exactly which label it was pressed on for the first time, as far as I know it could have been New Renaissance itself or even a self produced product, all I had was a home dubbed tape I got by tape trading. This time I can’t help you with many details, sorry! I never ever seen this album cover until I got this Cd. But believe me I used to play it to nausea, oh yes, I did… This is a gigantic recording of embryonic Death Metal, recorded in 1987 and comparable in heaviness and intensity to the likes of Death and Possessed. Now Dream Death‘s sound has sponged heavy influences from the grim, atonal sound of Celtic Frost and Hellhammer, but I won’t go so far as calling them Doom or even proto-Doom as I read elsewhere. There are no real sludgy parts in here and even Black Sabbath have made heavier, crunchier passages years before, so don’t be swayed by what you might have read. This however doesn’t meant that his album does not rule just becose it does not have incredible accelerations or lead-heavy bridges, becouse – fuck – it does! The vocals have a sound which bands today seems to be unable to produce, it’s very close to Messiah or demo-era Morbid Angel (“Abominations of Desolation” might be a good comparison), very clear but with just that inch of roughness to make it sound “evil”. This is Death Metal in the very earliest sense of the word. This music has the magic touch, the sparkle of insanity that made earlier Metal bands go one step further in extremity so that the journalists and fans could shape the term Death Metal after shit like this. The music is mostly mid to mid-fast with a constant droning sound so it lacks the brutal barbarity of Possessed (hey who doesn’t after all?) but there is this hypnotic vortex of ancestral forces that just drags you down into the sound. It’s like a tapestry being waved riff by riff song after song… slowly and inexorably. This is a BIG reccomendation for historians of the Death Metal phenomenon eh. The cover artwork doesn’t really reflect the lyrical content: it shows what looks like an humuncolous in a wizard laboratory (but hey, I love 80’s metal albums covers, even those of shit albums like England’s Samurai or Executioner), while most of the lyrics are more social with a desperate, passive attitude, save for some exceptions. The guitarists of this band went off to form the mildly-average-to-bad band Penance after disbanding Dream Death, so this is their only product, but PsycheDOOMElic has just released a collection of their demos on Cd, and guess what? I’m going do buy them right away! This Cd is hand numbered and limited so I think it’s wise to hurry up!

RAPIST WITH NO PENIS 1 - Reptilian Humanoid 2 - Anunnaki 3 - Intersplicing Genetic Material 4 - Draco BOWEL FETUS 5 - Death Begins in the Colon BASKET OF DEATH 6 - Hentai Slave Vacuum Cleaner Sodomy 7 - Gamen Hounyo Torture Nuru Nuru Rochson 8 - Nanpa Sex Beast Gokugan Pure 9 - Tako Sex Paste OUTHOUSE 10 - Invasive Anal Entry - Mulecular Meltdown - Therapeutic Cock-Chop - Anti-Anesthetic Penis peel

Hey so finally I got something from Septic System records to show you for your delight! First off this is not a pro-done Cd but a Cd-r that comes in a plastic bag, but for sure these graphics are accurate. I have seen pro silver discs in way uglier packagings. The first thing I thought when I got this 4 way was that it looked a bit like a release from Fecal Matter and actually, the layout has been done by The Rev, eh! It’s dripping so much shit and goo you don’t know how to handle it ah ah. Total scat gore aadoration! The bands contained herein are quite distinct in sound, and are arranged as follows:

RAPIST WITH NO PENIS plays a very noisy breed of gore/grind with drum machine. The vocals are gurgling deep, but not completely fucked up, you can still understand this guy articulates something with his mouth, even if the roar is quite low. Musically this is mostly very simple mid tempos goregrind with some loops and skillfully placed samples (the last song has that popping noise that sounds like the 80’s hit “Pop Corn”, ah ah). The sound is very, very rough, but we’re still in the realm of the understandable, mostly we get very distorted sound with a lot of dirt, but the riffs are still clear. I’d reccomend this band to lovers of mid paced sludgy goregrind and a knack for fetid sounds. 7.50 to me.

BOWEL FETUS strikes here with his trademark, foul apocalyptic concoction of sick Death Metal a la Autopsy and vocals that remind the sound of the chain stays of a bycicle falling off the sockets. This single song in the 4 way is still totally Autopsy in feel, but degenerates slowly into a wasteland of quicksand, Doom, muck and corpses a la Disembowelement or Halo. I cannot tell exactly how much I love this shit, everything is just arranged in the right fucking way: great guitar distortion and fabulous chords of doom, a realistc drum sound, and nasty boiling vocals… No shit here, I think this could be really a ultimate band, one of the 10 best in the world today if they got a vocalist like Gurge of Lord Gore. Mind ye, I think these vocals are okay, and they’re probably the only element that stitches Bowel Fetus to the Gore Grind genre, but I have the feeling with some different vocals, we could really have some astounding, spectacular results… nonetheless a full 9.00 fucking here!

BASKET OF DEATH is completely space noize stuff instead. This is the chaotic, wicked kind of noise grind that only far easteners seems to be able to produce. The drum machine is beating a totally gabber disco tempo, with 100% artificial sound, but above that, everything seems to be allowed. Frequencies and distortions, guitar loops, multiple layers of distorted vocals, even sampled parts of what seem rehearsals of traditional instrumental bands. The cool thing is that there’s always different things moving at the same time, so you can concentrate on this drone bass sound in the background or the muffled vocals or whatever is up and always get something different. Ahone must be crazy to hear this stuff, you get the impression of hearing a cassette which has been overdubbed ten times with Boredoms and a score of other noise bands. An 8.00 is deserved

OUTHOUSE keeps following the Noisecore line, but a bit less refined than Basket of Death, mostly you get impossibly rough shit a la Anal Birth but instead of a constant wave of noise, you get a more mid tempos, short blasts of fury and oversaturated vocals above a thick carpet of fuzzy noise shit. There are some samples here as well, but you don’t get the same impression of listening to several albums simultanously, this stuff is a bit rawer and siimpler. There are some spoken vocals as well in the mix, and a good half of this track is just a long dialogue. I’d give this band a 7.00.

1 - Do You Believe? 2 - Don't Matter 3 - Fallen 4 - Enough 5 - Killing Kids 6 - Lovely 7 - What'cha Gonna Do?

Okay I am getting somewhat old becouse when I read somewhere that Obscene Gesture was an Hard Core band, I was thinking about rough ’80’s Hard Core/Punk a la Minor Threat, Youth of Today etc., but it turned out being more like that kind of Thrash Metal/HC crossover which bloomed out in the late eighties! You remember all those skateboards and hand painted tees? The riffs are powerful and raging without that extra superflous dose of crunch and sound refinelments that generally spolied the HC scene after the rising of Earth Crisis and Integrity. Generally speaking I love my HC and Metal separated but hearing Obscene Gesture was fun, a mix of Verbal Abuse, Method of Destruction and newer Slayer. Yeah Slayer, what’s wrong with the new Slayer?? At least they’re still a violent band, even if their aesthetics don’t meet so much the favour of metal purists today… I don’t want to digress too much on new Slayer now, let’s just say this stuff is nice to hear, with angry pissed off vocals a la Billy Milano, sharp metallic riffs with a big dose of stomping groove, vulgar lyrics at al. A bit modern in sound, and the songs tend to be a bit too similar maybe, but tehy’re definitely well played. I though these guys were bums from the bowels of Los Angeles but I researched there are former members of Agent Steel and Steel Prophet here (horrible bands both but that means competent players). If you liked Thrash/HC crossover a la Sacred Reich, Crumbsuckers, S.O.D. etc, this might be interesting to check out, a full length album is being written as I write this.

1 - Track from Butchered Feast of Being 2 - Track from Butchered at Birth Day 3 - Bonus Live Track 4 - Bonus Live Track

If my opinion is worth anything, Butcher ABC is much better than Clotted Symmetric Sexual Organ, at least than the last few releases of the Jap Grind anime kommandos. That this band is a tribute to old school death metal (which is still my favourite genre) can’t be more blatant than this: the logo on the cover of this promo reminds fairly that of a famous band from England (eh), and the back of the booklet spots the cover artwork of that great “Mad Butcher” album by Destruction. And I just love bloodspattered surgeon vests, gas masks, chains and denim and all the graphic bollocks this band manages to grab along on stage. The sound of this band Cd is sick, there’s a weird kind of distortion which reminds me a lot of Sweden’s Crematory and Germany’s Coprophagist but it even gets more twisted and sludgy in the second track, grabbed from their first album. So on this promo you get one track from “Butchered at Birth Day” and one from “Butchered Feast of Being”, and things don’t seem to haven’t changed much… still nasty old school Swedish/Finnish Death Metal, with vomiting vocals, some vaguely punkish riffs, only the sound seems a little bit less oppressive from one part, but the riffs are heavier…. Before going in depth I’d rather stop becouse I prefer to make a full review of the new album instead of scattering it among promo tracks and EPs. You also get and two good live extra tracks (almost half an hour) on this Cd, which start with a riff from Black Sabbath (hey these guys just can’t live without citing the classics) and gives a good idea of what this band has to offer. Being a promo of just four songs, you can’t expect something unforgettable, but it’s nice to get, I think Naru still has some copies at the Obliteration HQ, you cen order it along with the new Butcher ABC album!