Archives: Reviews

4 - Genocide 5 - Crucified by Oblivion 6 - 3 Seconds to Extinction

Okay there’s the name of a drummer here, so I assume there’s really a human being behind the kit, and that man, he’s really FAST. That alone would be incredible but my spider sense is pulsing in my head alound. I think that assuming there’s really a drummer beneath these songs, this is either the worst studio triggering attempt I have ever heard or the track has been modified during the engineering in some way becouse the last time I heard such a fake sound was with Awful‘s demo “Absolute Reign” and that time the drums were doubled in speed in the studio! Trying to exclude this horribly fake background noise, you get some unconventional kind of Death Metal, a bit far from the other two bands in approach and structure. First off the songs are not so constantly broken into a moltitude of riffs but mostly follow the traditional structure of even numbers of chirds and chorus. The riffs are okay if not impressively original, the vocals more in the vein of early Deicide than modern day wild boar grunters (eh), that means brutal timbre but quite understandable. I don’t know what’s exactly but I cannot shrug off the impression that this band is just a one man project recorded in a bedroom with some sound editing software. Maybe it’s these horrendous drums that make everything so artificial. In any case I am not overly impressed. The last song of the three remind me a bit of that band Aurora Borealis which was so acclaimed some years ago, but I never liked that one also very much. This is brutal but lacks a bit of the obscure Death Metal feel. Too sterile.

1 - Nihilist Preachers of Death 2 - Dining Upon the Unburied 3 - 38-gauge Absolution

Well first off the cover artwork is almost indeciphrable. It’s so dark you mostly see shades here. However after some tweaking with curves in Photoshop I managed to see what’s lying beneath and hey, this is a cool artwork indeed, looks like some abstract bio-mechanical work of worms and bloated flesh, reminds me of some Aaron Cain works! Someone has to be executed for concealing this work under layers of darkness. Blasphemer plays a modern breed of Brutal Death Metal of the fastest kind with non stop multi faceted riffing and a ton of guitar harmonics and chuggish breakdowns which well, just scream the words Deeds of Flesh aloud in my ears! The drummer is razor sharp in his work, competent and with concrete awareness of his surroundings: he has the uncommon quality of being able to work along the other instruments, placing evidence to the few slams by battering the snare drums so to give emphasis to the multitude of breaks you get along the songs. I don’t mind for the few screams which in my opinion are always useless, but the vocals are deep and guttural and they work fine for the overall job as well. You get killer Brutal Death without melodies or solos, recorded almost flawlessly as well. Might it be that it suffers a bit from being somewhat derivative but I never thought of that as an issue. I think this stuff is meant to be fun to play and hear, not for some challenge to being original.

1 - Ascending Demise 2 - Chaos Cometh (part 1) 3 - Chaos Cometh (part 2) 4 - Majestic Insurrection

The trick of recording the 7″ at 33rpm was necessary to fit the demo tracks of this interesting Norwegian Abominat into vinyl without making cuts or adding compression. The package is beautiful and has that cool engraving effect in the middle which is not exploited often these days as well. So if the cover looks a bit like Seagrave’s work (a bit too blurred) what can the music inside be like? Well I’ll tell you that from the first two seconds, I thought the first song was “Liege of Inveracity” re-recorded ah ah! And hell, the rest of the song keeps that flame alive, total “Effigy of the Forgotten” worship goddammit!!! The pacing, distortion, vocal style, everything reflects a cool tribute to early Suffocation and it works better than Siksakubur or Deep Red if you ask me, this band just sounds fantastic. Judging by the fact these guys look quite young, when I read about old school DM worship I was thinking more of Entorturement, Repudilation, Mangled, Internal Bleeding etc. But hell no, I cannot think of anything else but old Suffo for comparisons. And you cannot blame me, they’re so distant from the rest that you either sound like them or you don’t. Not even “Sermon of Mockery” captures this spirit so well. So I shall demolish them for being copycats? Hell no, why should I? These guys know how to play. Granitic chunky riffs interconnect rabidly over a frantic drumming, and these powerful vocals spit pure hate with massive compression. The only think I cannot judge is lyrics, which are also quite personal in Suffocation‘s works, I wonder if the cloning process is being so fine grained eh eh. What can I say, fans of Suffocation have to hear this. And the rest of you cunts too!

1 - hdfh 2 - Infested

Might it be just me, but I always found this band amazing, with elements both refreshing and nostalgic, ever since their demo Cd-r landed in my shop in 2003. The band seems to have even progressed further here and now here we get some undecyphrable kind of Death Metal which sounds completely old-school and at the same time weird and experimental. It’s like one of those earlier attempts at experimenting with sound coming from bands like Disharmonic Orchestra or Carbonized, not some fluffy jazz shit like that Wombbath Ep I reviewed yesterday. And they’re coming from Norway, now that’s surprising ah ah! What’s killer in these tracks is the perfect balance of down tuned guitar strings and dissonant, grating chords: you get a jumbled mix which is amazingly cool to hear, with a wonderful “retro” taste of mukti-layered metallic distortions and screams from beyond the grave. And the weirdness just doesn’t stop here, just look at the wonderful abstract cover or the cryptic lyrics printed on the back of the sleeve. The vocals are grotesque (drummer-vocalist like Cadaver!) but filtered with that radio effect which make them sound vaguely similar to Fudge Tunnel or Helmet, but don’t be swayed, they’re still totally Death Metal. Give me this shit anytime instead of all the postcore gay haircut bands of today put together. Everything sounds vintage Death Metal and avant-garde at the same time, sprinkled by a thin veil of genius and that nasty sick vibe of Autopsy at times. I won’t annoy you too much on the details about how Nuclear Abominations was supposed to release this Ep becouse what matters in the end is that these tracks got released after all. If I were in you, I’d buy it for cheap from this cool label No Posers Please!, it’s just limited to 500 hand numbered splatter vinyl copies and has a bonus sticker as well!

1 - Prevent Anemia 2 - Intestinal Bleeding 3 - A Silent as the Grave 4 - Corporal Punishment 5 - Performed in Depth 6 - Conceal Interior Torments 7 - Beyond the Gloomy 8 - Abandon 9 - Several Shapes

Aha, gotcha! You thought I was forgetting about the Vintage Friday feature? Hell no, look what I dug up from the past for today: Wombbath‘s debut album “Internal Caustic Torments” on Infest records! You might recall the name of Wombbath from a rather common Ep Cd which pops out often in record fairs and second hand shops, called “Lavatory”. Well it’s the same band but that mini is complete shit, forget about it, this is the real Wombbath stuff you need to hear! Since I doubt Infest still retains copyrights on these songs I will also enclose an mp3 with the review. Let’s see what happens. If someone wants me to take it off I can do that in a second, just tell me okay?

So how is this Wombbath like, does it have the Sunlight sound or..? Well no, actually. This record is a perfectly balanced mix of Brutal Swedish Death Metal a la Grave and English Death Metal a la early Napalm Death, Impaler or Benediction. The dynamics of the riffs are heavily fragmented, resulting in a dense, brutal display of chuggish riffs that pummel with brute force, adorned with deeply guttural grunts which are delicuously old school, yet more Anglo-Saxon than Scandinavian. The Swedish ancestry shows however through the instrumentation mostly in the way the more flowing structures are arranged, purely in the “Into the Grave” or evolved Massacre fashion, with some extra grinding attempts. For once, I prefere the most traditional Swedish riffs than the chunky breakdowns, for that’s also where you can almost discern some common roots with bands like Crematory or the Finnish Purtenance. This is no average Stockholm Death Metal, this stuff is blunt, deep and bludgeoning, full of primitive brutality and somewhat oversimplified guitar riffs. There is not much to say on the booklet except for a spectacular cover artwork by SV Bell, the Canadian artist who had also drawn covers of Kataklysm, Oppressor, Gutted, Impaled Nazarene, Obliveon and so on. It is just a folded sheet with a thanklist and a band picture, no lyrics included. What can I say, this is a classick, try to find it and good luck! Their 7″ is probably a bit easier to get, same great shit!

1 - Descent Into a Maelstrom 2 - Laughter Through Thousand Winds 3 - Lies After, Cries of Hope 4 - Lavatory Suicide Remains

How this band managed to change so drastically in just one year is beyond me. This stuff is even worse than Morgoth‘s “Feel sorry for the Fanatics” or Entombed‘s “Wolverine Blues”. I haven’t exactly clear what kind of direction they were thinking they were taking when they wrote this. There are some bluesy twists in this pile of shit which could be associated to late Entombed and some of the weirdness of latest Carbonized or Oxiplegatz, but the music is just completely impossible to categorize. Shitty Metal with some attempts at Hard Core, Egyptian folk music, Blues and Space Metal and maybe a bit of erratic experimentations as well. These riffs are bad rock with barking vocals that sound just stupid. There are slow meloidc solos and just way too many minutes of agony in this Ep. This is horrendous, but just to warn you of the difference between this Ep and the album before, and since I spent money to get this myself long ago, I found it nice to post it. Even for an experimental album this is total failure. I wonder if Napalm actually heard this stuff when they signed this band or if they were thinking of finding elements of their previous album.

1 - Gutted Whore (Intro) 2 - Raped, Murder & Fuck 3 - Slayer 4 - In the Sun Rises the Oblivion 5 - Mortem (Instrumental) 6 - Caligula 7 - The Killed Priest (Intro) 8 - God is Dead 9 - The Sphere 10 - Throught the Red Bloody Skies 11 - Satan Spawn Blood Metal

Well I don’t know about god, but the pope surely is (dead)! Ah ah. Great pic on the back sleeve. So here we have a lot of very good premises: a band from Central America (El Salvador), with a Moyen cover art and a penchant for alcoholics! And hell yes, this is good shit indeed, the sound is as abrasive as a mix of Venom, Hellhammer and Sadism. What you get here is old school mix of Thrash Metal and primitive Black Metal. One can think of Morbosidad or Throneum at first but this is way more like pure thrash with that 80’s special feel. I haven’t read if there is any gap between the recording of side A and B but side B sounds way better and different! At least the first few minutes, becouse the last two tracks sound like if the master tape was damaged, it’s mostly fuzzy noise. There are a couple of metal bridges with arpeggios and shit like that which border a bit on traditional but the vocals are just excellent, with huge reverb and that phlegmy timbre, that the result is always of totally metallic headbanging chaos. The sound is very dirty which is okay of course, but the waveforms must have been pushed all the way upward becouse I can’t hear any basses here. It’s just all mid and high frequencies and on the long run it becomes a bit plain. This record did convince me anyway, this is good spike, leather, sweat and alcohool Metal for headbangers. Gets a bit too standard ’90s Black Metal at the very end but I am sure those are old tracks. I just want to thank you Warwick for butchering completely Moyen’s artwork with the most absurd and childish collection of Photoshop effects one can think of. Millions of colors and shades despoil a cover which has even been sent to the printer in the wrong resolution! I bet Chris didn’t provide it’s artwork with these huge blurry pixels… fuck off to all you amateurish artists! This guy must have been drunk when sending this shit to the pressing plant. Intolerable on an album as good as this. Good old school Thrash/Black Metal here, despite the packaging!