Archives: Reviews

1 - Elohim 2 - Tales from the Tomb 3 - Drain Access 4 - Timeless 5 - Screaming in Phobia 6 - Indication Vitalis 8 - Soul Incest 9 - Sprangskitten 10 - Towards the Endless Throne 11 - Lepra 12 - The Final Conflict (The Pornoflute pt. 2) 13 - Splenium for Nyktophobia

There are so many things to say about Unisound, and so many anecdotes by bands ripped by Panos and company, that we can fill up a whole book just with quotes. To be honest I never lost any money from the few orders I made to that label, and even got some promotional material for free (just a few compilations of mediocre material, but always free stuff). Decapitated records (then called Unisound) seems still active today since I noticed a huge amount of Abhorer/Necrophile split Cds in distros and trade lists recently, while I don’t think it was never released on Cd back at the time (or maybe someone ripped off Unisound, that would be ironic ah ah!). Some real interesting releases came out from that label, including the fantastic Necromass Lp (which despite blabbering, it IS a great Black Metal album), and stuff by Order from Chaos, Necromantia, Thou Art Lord and the first Rotting Christ stuff. I am more than happy of having bought the Lp but I got the Cd as well for the fuck’s sake and well, it is still great shit to hear in the car stereo, but well I am digressing as usual, I’ll move on to Uncanny now. Seems like Uncanny and Fulmination both co-existed for a while, but it was only Uncanny that managed to record a full album with the ultra famous Dan Swano (for those curious Fulmination was much more “thrashier” and simpler, with vocals adorned with heavy reverb which gave them a wicked, Black Metal feel – read Black Metal as it was meant before the march of the penguins began – in my copy of the ’92 demo, I have to say that Fredrik doesn’t appear as a second guitarist). What came out of the studio can be summed up in three simple words: Swedish Death Metal, and a solid record ot that. It was released a bit outside of the 3 years range 1989-1992 that saw so many huge releases in the Swedish ground, but this is great shit nonetheless, it is a record that really deserves to be mentioned more often. One of their two guitarist is in Katatonia now, which even if I don’t care anything about for, it is still a super professional band and their riffs are far from second hand, so you can imagine this shit is not just reheated soup. The riffs in here are so thoroughly Swedish I almost cringe: multi layered and totally in the vein of the more dynamic side of that early northern scene, let’s say more like Utumno or House of Usher that the heavier, Autopsy oriented grave sound of bands like (ahem) Grave or Dismember. The matrix is still fundamentally Nihilist/Entomed (hell what band was not influenced by that?) but I think that while the sound is neck deep in that period, any direct comparisons to other bands of the time would be too approximative. The overal speed is that of “Clandestine” but the chords are not, I think this is an album that’s better listened than described. Now that Bloodbath have been spoiled by the atrocious overrated non-talent of Peter Tagtren, I wonder if we will ever manage to get bands as good as this anymore. Anyway, we have plenty of bands forom that era to discover haven’t we? “Splenium for Nyktophobia” (which roughly means, an artifical cure for the fear of darkness, or some medical term related to that) is (was) an excellent Swedish Death album, somewhat lighter in sound than, say, early Entombed or Dark Throne (“Soulside” days) but with neat, complex arrangements and a good dose of melodic bridges that enhance the experience without turning the whole music mellow. You get also some nicely 80’s solos like the one in “Timeless”, with unconventional arpeggios as well. The vocals too are not just low but extremely clear and able to modulate a wide range of Death Metal vomits, which was also a trademark of the Swedish scene, if one wants to get a clear picture of how real Death Metal vocals sound like one should definitely hear these, becouse they’re excellent; they sound somewhat higher towards the end, I have no idea of it was becouse of the strain the singer got in the studio or if these were recorded sperately. The songs too become a bit more like old Fulmination with a more traditional approach towards the end of the album but we still are fully in Death Metal ground. Luckily this band decided to disband before releasing third rate mediocre stuff like Crypt of Kerberos or Wombbath: we got a classic here, which along with their split with Ancient Rites can be displayed produly along with other Swedish classics! When I’ll manage to get a camera I’m surely going to review the split as well (I don’t think it ever made its way into vinyl, has it?). There is a completely different track in the album as well called “Lepra” which is more Industrial Metal in sound, which should be pointed out, and a cool outro with a nice medieval feel (which is also the title track!). The booklet of this album was approximative to say the least, it was full color but printed only on one side, without lyrics nor pictures, just a quick thanks list. The cover loos nice and original, even if it’s not incredibly clear, it could be the bleaching sun as seen from a holle dug in the ground, or a representation of the Hell, who knows? Seems like Avesta had its Death Metal champions and not just bisons and steel mills! PS: Is it just me or there is a chorus in “Tales from the Tomb” which is totally ripped off from the one sung by Corpsegrinder in Suffocation’s “Reincremation” (“Effigy of the Forgotten”)?

1 - All too Human 2 - A Piercing Gaze 3 - Watch the Red Devils Burn 4 - Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea 5 - Condensed Flesh (Void cover) 6 - Intifada and the Politic of Revenge 7 - Going Out on a High Note 8 - Mask of Sanity 9 - Moods like a Guillotine 10 - Bury Me at Makeout Creek 11 - The Kill (Napalm Death cover)

Halo of Knives belong to that category of new-sound postgrindcore bands which I really have to come hating. You know, emo cuts, pastel color jogging suits, blurred band pictures, poetic lyrics and cover arts a la Neurosis. It is that kind of heavy on dissonance grindcore whose energy is not directed against one specific target (which supposedly is the listener) but just sputtered aimlessly in random directions. The screams are more like full of agony than hate, and that’s something that for a start I was already hating in the mid 90’s years when new school hard core bands that used to scream and roll on stage in desperation started to appear (Spawn, Timebomb etc). But the thing I really found unnerving is that use of disharmonic bridges which sound oh so intellektual. While the riff structure is definitely grindcore when the blastbeats take the stage (and therefore the punk-easy chords are at the backbone of the whole string section), it seems the fun spirit of grindcore leaves the place to some kind of intelligent emo haircut kind of core which I today find more and more intolerable. My low rating is not meant to say this record is played sloppily or unprofessionally, it is just my statement of intent against this kind of nauseatingly artistic kind of grind (math?) core with pretenses of high culture. I bet the guys at Terrorizer magazine are loving this stuff. I think the keyword “crust” here in describing Halo of Knives has to be completely erased, this is just too refined stuff for being catalogued as crust, which somewhat involves a rough, punkish (well, ahem, “crusty” actually) attitude and sound. And also all references to Napalm Death, Nasum or other straight in your face grindcore bands have to go. This is probably how a band like The End would sound if they were to play faster music. This is a side project of a band called Hailstones Kill 200, but I know nothing of that one so just take it as trivia. To cut it short, take all the bollocks out today in modern grind and hardcore and make it into an album and you would probably get something close to this. If we have to speak about new grind, I’d rather have Rotten Sound any day, sorry (well, anything else would do actually ahah! Give me Rot and Minch!)! This stuff just sounds pissed off and angry at itself rather than releasing energy outwards. Definitely NOT my genre, even if with some decent vocals, songs like “Watch the Red Devils Burns” and “Moods Like a Guillotine” could have been something, luckily untainted by those terrible nerd riffs. If the dissonant bridges were to go away I’d gladly give this band another try, but I doubt. Two covers also appear, one by Napalm Death, one by Void (is this last one any good?). If I had heard the music only I would have bet this was some digipack record from Hydra Head with 20.000 bucks design and pantone trims that included at least some bacteria or microscope photo on the cover ah ah. Nay, the artwork and layout are essential and elegant but totally okay. Ah! I just perched inside the booklet and guess what? Blurred photos and emo core cuts!! I’d have bet a fucking million of euros if I had it!! And the lyrics, oh the lyrics… soo ethereal and soo “big glasses” literature! Ah ah!

1 - Intro/Onanismo Crónico 2 - Masturbación Prolongada de un Infante 3 - Mendigo 4 - Zombien Sexual Attack 5 - More fuck, More Fun 6 - Orgasmos Anales 7 - Rotting Corpses in the Dark Rooms 8 - Depositos de Semen 9 - Intoxicación 10 - Vomiting Vaginal Blood by Uterine Cannibalism 11 - Conjugacion de Liquido Seminal y Saliva 12 - Sexual Licanthropy 13 - El Delicado Ano de una Niña de 10 años 14 - Deformación de la Vulva 15 - The Fucking Whore 16 - Arts of Farts (Issacarium cover) 17 - Ruptura del Ano en la Penetración 18 - Ahogado en Semen

It took me a while before doing this review because the promo had arrived without covers, but now Joel sent them and well, let’s crack on some details. The artwok first, looks professional but I admit I don’t like it very much, a bit too technological with all this computer graphics fade ins and sci-fi fonts, the concept is sick and interesting: a morgue, a open cunt, some squirting cocks, stitches etc. but the whole thing looks like real pictures but retouched too heavily with photoshop in a quite cheap way. The lyrics of this band are in Spanish and deal with extreme sex with a slight gore inclination. One should expect a sick goregrind massacre now shouldn’t he? Well, I haven’t heard the previous “Depositos de Semen” demo 2002, but I can tel pretty straight that this one is good, dirty, rough Brutal Death with a strong porn oriented imagery, but definitely not like Sublime Cadaveric Decomposition or other goregrind masters. The distortion is sick and saturate with creaking basses and the vocals guttural to the point of unrecognition, but here we still have the structure and feel of Death Metal, even if taken to extremest levels (like Enmity). There are a lot of intros from big budget to more underground movies (the starting one is from Freddy vs Jason… not a real good one in my opinion) all across the album. The songs are short, somewhat chaotic, so it is not always easy to follow what the guitars do but they become faster and more violent as we approach the end. In the beginning the mid tempos seemed a bit predominant but the blasbeats appear with more frequency as the disc goes. The fast parts are indeed okay, it’s the slower tempos that maybe need some more groove to call this band goregrind with capital “G”. Anyway the sound is vomiting enough for my taste and the vocals phlegmy and deep enough to challenge a bullfrog. I am not a big fan of the screamy vocals that appear sometimes but you know, they always have to put those in for some unfathomable reason. This is an album which is probably a good choice for lovers of more basic, amelodic Death Metal than for those into technical wanking, not as powerful as Suppuration, but gurgling and gory nonetheless. It’s good to hear Freddy opening and closing the album, even if the excerpts are from his last movie.

Okay, this movie is real bad, in the beginning I wanted to throw the DVD in the furnace, but I resisted the first half and I have to admit, it’s still quite better than a lot of recent zombie movies like “Resident Evil”. The acting is terrible and the film has a texture and a sound that reminds me of a TV movie, but towards the end I get enough gore to satisfy my hunger. The worst part of the whole movie is probably when the vial containing the DNA altering virus opens, and you get a horrible CGI effect when a small sparkle of light appears in front of the soon to be diseased victims, and I really felt like throwing up when I realized that all of the patients got some sort of empathic link that made all of them feel and hear the same things. This is complete sci-fi, not horror, and despite the fact the line separating the two is weak, I nonetheless think it was horrible when one of them got punched in the face and all the rest shook their heads as if they were hit themselves. It was pure comedy. Now that I said the worst moments, I can summarize the story: the year is 1968 (when “Night of the Living Dead” was shot) and a Russian airplane that contains an American DNA-altering virus crashes in the Western states. The vials are taken to a secret military hospital where it infects the whole crew, the army is called up there and a squad shots everybody in the head so that the plague could be contained. These movies move too quickly for my tastes, I kinda prefer Romero and Fulci zombies, but oh well… Unluckily, one of these vials is stolen by a soldier who also gets killed during the cleansing. almost 40 years later, the vial is found by a patient of the psychiatric hopsital that is built upon the secret base, run by a cold asshole of a doctor which looks nastily like Sascha of Cock and Ball Torture. The personality of the patients of the hospital are explored discretely, the protagonist is a necrophobic who has fallen in love with a suicidal depressive girl. The rest of the cast is barely credible and bi-dimensional, and some of the secondary appearances are just ludicrous (look at the fat chick who’s taking the pills when the grilfight begins…come on…), but even if the initial effects of skin falling from the faces and shoulders is mild, when the brown and black vomit appears, things start getting interesting. Festering sores appear on the diseased, and vomit and convulsions abound. There is a funny scene when this mongoloid guy continues eating his soup even after one of the semi zombies pukes into his plate. Ah ah. Reminds me a bit of the ear in Braindead… One of the guardians of the hospital is a bastard who tries to abuse the suicidal girl in the beginning of the movie but gets bitten by her festering bite and his mutation becomes the most horrible. When he’s completely rotten in his bed, he’s awakened by a small wound on the doctor’s finger and then gets dismembered in a savory, graphic way. I won’t go into more detail becouse I hate spoilers. Whatever the case, this movie was not meant to be a real follow up to Day of the Dead (it is not even fairly at the same level of course), but the directors themselves Ana Clavell and James Glenn Dudelson declared it could be a parallel, an alternative or a precedent story in regards to the Romero quadrilogy. Anyway, it is not as bad as it seemed in the beginning. There is a good dose of goo and dismemberments and that’s the reason I bought it, so fuck it. It lacks cohesion and suspence but that’s something which is not present even in much bigger budget movies. A good “8” rating goes to Greg McDougall, makeup artist and pupil of Tom Savini, which didn’t spare on the gore. Apart from a ugly computer effect on the wounds of the zombies when the final metamorphosis begins, the rest is purely analogic foam and fake blood the old school way. Long live analog. In music and cinema.

I had the impression my DVD was cut becouse sometimes the scenes change abruptly but I compared the running times and it seems it is just a matter of unprofessionalism in editing. Have a look if the running time is 103 minutes.

1 - Anal-thorized Autopsy (They Reign Supreme Forever!) 2 - Swarming Maggot Feast 3 - The Spew 4 - Cadaver Breath (L.H.O.T.L.) 5 - Festering Rectal Sludge - Disgorgement 6 - Feasting on Excrements 7 - Wound Fuck / Confessions of a Necrophile (Gut covers) 8 - Anal Vapor Rising 9 - I Shit (You Eat!) 10 - Your Fun-eral 11 - Charred Remains/Gasping for Air/Twisted mass of Burnt Decay/In The Grip of Winter (Autopsy covers)

Hey is the intro taken from “Wizard of Gore”? Whatever. When I got this promo in the mailbox I knew that something special was going on. The art and layout in this Cd both looked splendid and charmingly old school. It had all the feel of golden age horror comics, plus an accurate and elegant touch of color, which is used with intelligence, for once. For some reason, I was not surprised it was Fernando of Black Hole who arranged the whole project on the graphic dept. And I was about to cum when I read that there were four Autopsy covers at the end of the album, becouse you kow that I consider Autopsy the greatest Death Metal band of all times and well, it was a pleasure reading this album was a dedication to that most important of Death Metal bands ever. It should also be noted that the vocalist of this band is Andrè from Lymphatic Phlegm! Now that’s something for good premises! As the disc started spinning, the first notes of the album were screaming “Severed Survival”. But as things develop, I recognize we don’t have pure Autopsy worship here a la Anatomia or Mausoleum. Offal plays old school Death Metal with open textures and some very slow doomy bridges, with inhuman splattery vocals and a vague touch of grind, it’s a complete tribute to Autopsy and Gut but it’s also a band per se. Things are a bit stiffer and less sludgy than with those bands, and that’s mainly the missing element here. The rule is is to keep the riffs simple, the percussions adhering only to what’s needed for the riffs to stand out, and it works for sure. But to be honest some of the riffs aren’t really anything too special. The concept to me is more than good anyway, old school Death Metal plus mutilated corpses, entrails and gore are a combination which I cannot miss eh eh. Let’s say that it lacks some hook, but the rest is arranged perfectly. Some Gut covers also appear in the middle of the album, and they’re an further statement on how they want to keep their music sicker and simpler. Possibly with a slighly denser production and heavier sound we could have had something really amazing, but the recording just sounds a bit distant. This stuff is generally speaking a superior example of love for the good things in Death Metal and Gore Grind, and it’s terrific in its simplicity. Just some adjustements here and there and you might get something REAL good. In any case I would buy this album immediately!! Top reccomendation!

1 - The Stench of Redemption 2 - Death to Jesus 3 - Desecration 4 - Crucified for the Innocence 5 - Walk With the Devil in Dreams You Behold 6 - Homage for Satan 7 - Not of this Earth 8 - Never to be Seen Again 9 - The Lord's Sedition

If General Surgery‘s debut was an event to ponder, Deicide‘s eigth studio album is such even more. The main thought that fell into me as I was listening to this album, and believe me I have listened to it many times now, is that that this guy with paige cut hair is really getting old. Don’t misunderstand me this album is stuill full of energy and violence, but for a start, it’s becoming always less Deicide and always more traditional Metal plus some Deicide touches. I read an interview with Benton who was talking about how Elvis was cool when he saw him live, and guess whose band is being covered in an alternative edition of this album? Deep Purple!!! Fuck!! Deep Purple!!! The mummies, the walking corpses, who the fuck is caring for that acid trip shit nowadays? When are Deicide going to pay homage to the fucking Beatles? Apart from this, the guy is getting bald and fat, shot a video of him riding a motorcycle (ah ah ah, yeah, just like that Manowar video!), and released an album like this, so chock full of Malmsteen-like solos I was about to vomit. Honestly, were the Hoffman brother THAT important in the making of the songs? I guess we’ll know only when they’ll be forming a new band (and I read they are). Now that I said all the obnoxious things about this album, it’s time for me to tell you that aside for all that bullshit, this album is definitely good. You have to work a bit on CoolEdit or a similar audio editing program to CUT OFF all the solos, because they’re really unbearable, but once you delete them permanently from the mix (please Earache, once it’s time for a re-edition, release an alternative version of this album without that guitar shit), you get solid, powerful and fast rhytmic riffs, with Steve’s trademark super double bass carpeting the whole album. It is always delicious to hear how Deicide still manages to write power riffs that mainitain the crush even when arranged in such fast tempos. Glen’s vocals are still deep and cavernous, avan if without that histerical, possessed timbre of the first two albums. I won’t say again, that they got back the genius of “Legion”, but for sure this is not the ton of smoking shit that was “Once Upon the Cross” either (not to mention the following non-existing albums). We follow the lines of “Scars of the Crucifix” now, as this album is still one hundred percent super tightly fastened Death Metal with Deicide’s trademark backing screams. However I have also to say they lost some of their trademark sound, which has evolved a bit towards more traditional solutions. I was tempted to give this album a 9-score rating, but the solos in here are so horrendous and superfluous that I should give the whole album a five minus (listen that ridicolous wanking in song 4! What’s that , The Toy Dolls?). Whatever the case, I personally suggest to skip the solos manually with the fast forward button and try to savor the rest. There is a lot of solid guitarwork here, without the classic “Legion” overlays but quite interesting nonetheless. And the cover artwork looks superb, especially compred to the cover of “Serpents of the Light” (ah ah what a joke that one!), it reeks of brimstone!