Archives: Reviews

1 - Prelude 2 - Morbid Feelings 3 - Necroritual 4 - Across the Battlefield 5 - Interlude 6 - Ancient Invocations of Death 7 - Surrounded by Darkness 8 - Impious Wisdom 9 - Insanity 10 - Divine Armageddon 11 - outro

Hey this Kurtulrat is not bad at all. I gave this “Necroritual” a first listen in my car stereo and it didn’t sound too impressive but once at home, with the right stereo set, some balance tweaks and the right environment this turned out working quite effectively. You can’t really define a clear genre here, hypotetically we could label them as Black Metal, but not more than Arkhon Infaustus or Antaeus if you know what I mean, posers might call this Black Death becouse there is no black and white cover, but you know how inflated with shit that scene is today. We’re not discussing about cliched Immortal like chords and shrieking vocals, but more about a combination of extreme elements, among which you can even hear riffs a la old Krisiun, and everything drenched in a malignant atmosphere (which is what all Black Metal is about isn’t it?). Lots of emphasis has been given to the evocative, average speed riffs instead of the faster ones only, so you get 99% mid tempo, blackish guitarwork with real excellent lacerating, powerful vocals. Black Metal penguins please take note what it means to sing in the higher range of frequencies without sounding ridicolous, this singer is real good, reminds me a bit of In Aeternum, maybe a bit more versatile. Some of these riffs remind me also a bit of second-era Dark Throne (around Panzerfaust) – meets – Watain – meets old Mayhem, but that’s a good thing I guess. Again, there are no fast parts in here so the comparison works only for the slower riffs of these bands, same thing when I was talking about Krisiun. There are a few isolated spots when the singer tends to follow the guitar melody and that’s not real effective, but for the rest this album sounds absolutely complete, sick, evil, and with a heavy, damp atmosphere. The cover and layout too are top level, simple but powerful and with the right imagery for a Black Metal album. I think this band hit the point perfectly.

1 - Just Funny Day 2 - Sacrificial Gore 3 - Romance of the Dead 4 - Transformation 5 - Redemption 6 - Christ Hunt 7 - Beauty of Blood 8 - Vitiator 9 - Great Quest 10 - Lunatics

I always do reviews following the same routine, as suggested by the defunct master of underground music John Peel with some personal variations: I place the Cd into the tray and let it go, dimming the lights so it is barely possible to read the lyrics in the booklet, and let the music flow into me, reading the booklet a bit, enjoying the music in turns. Once the Cd has finished, I give it a second spin while surfing the ‘net for some additional infos on the band (or browsing through my old fanzines if the band is relatively old), and to see if my impressions are shared by other reviewers. Well I have to recognize one thing. Years ago I was complaining becouse there were just a few idiots making reviews on bigger mags, but I have noticed the thing has not changed much with the Internet: there are just more idiots writing blogs and webzines that have no real clue about what this music is about. For one, it seems everybody has compared this band to Dismember and even Unleashed (!!). Well I tell you now: there is not even the farthest touch of Unleashed in here (well at least the Unleashed I know, I have stopped following their albums since “Across the Open Sea”), and the Dismember resemblances basically start and end with the first song on “Death Metal” “On Fire”. Apart for that song and maybe the “Misanthropic” Ep, I believe it’s quite difficult to say that Dismember is a melodic Death Metal band like this one, if you think so, please check their best work the “Pieces” Ep and tell me where the fucking melody is in that cult jewel. Now all this chatter to introduce a band that surely plays a kind of Death Metal heavily influenced by the late nineties brand of melodic death metal that followed the success of At The Gates, and rapidly spread across the country. Mortifilia is from Czech republic and plays a competent form of death Metal with a solid songwriting, melodic solos and a lot of galloping thrashing riffs veined with that kind of Scandinavian melody, which however is thankfully quite far from the realm of garish shit metal of that horrible band called In Flames. Some of the riffs can be defined as a cross of very early Dark Tranquillity (“Skydancer” era, before they wimped out completely), Autumn Leaves and who knows, maybe Without Grief, I am not a very big conoisseur of this kind of Metal, it kinda slip off my brain cells. The vocals are guttural but not too much, they always remain understadable and you can follow the lines of the lyrics easily. The English might need some polishing but they’re understandable, dealing with memories, fucks and death. The booklet has a very good artwork, and this style of reds and oranges is repeated all through the booklet for a consistant look. However the layout is so cheap it’s in heavy contrast with the good work on the images. The fonts too big and not the best choice for a work like this, and the logo is butchered by a horrible embossing effect. Too bad becouse there were a lot of ideas tha could be exploited out of this nice artwork. So, once again I have to say this is not really a genre I understand much. I never understood why they wanted to add melodic tunes into Death Metal, it’s a contraddiction in terms. It is either Death Metal or it’s melodic isn’t it? However strange it may sound, I admit this coupling sometimes works (see Unanimated, At the Gates, Eucharist) (well in any case it works better than the coupling of Black Metal imagery and popeye vocals… or viking lyrics and corpsepaint for that matter… ahah, how fucking stupid… I’m digressing, I know). I cannot really reccomend this album for those who like real Death Metal, but if you use to put sugar, lime and strawberry syrup into your beer, you might also like this mix of Death Metal plus melodic bridges. It’s rather well done and it has no weak spots I can exploit except for a overdosage of melody towards the end, expecially in the solos. I can just hope they were earlier works.

1 - Contorted Morality 2 - Hybrid Artillery 3 - That Which Dwells Within 4 - Die! Die! (Cancer cover)

I am afraid this Seeking Obscure is not as convincing as Unburied, though. Seeking Obscure is fundamentally a one man band lead by Rob Luckie, also owner of this small indie label Metalbolic who released the split in question (well, at least the P.O. Box is the same). The concept here is to create some only-slam slow tempo Death Metal with guttural vocals. What’s wrong here however is that to me, when Death Metal is this slow, it better has to a) have a truly sick doomy vein a la old Autopsy or b) be very, very heavy and impossibly guttural. These tracks are, honestly, neither and also completely uninspired. They sound just slow, but not THAT grinding slow, and sooo dangerously close to the always feared tarantella DM riffs. There are some horrendous samples and terrible vaguely melodic solos as well mixed in, and the fun thing is, these solos are the faster parts in the whole side of this split. All the emphasis here is given to the groove and the power of the riffs, but I have really to say these are not the kind of riffs that give a real feeling of crushing heaviness, they almost sound casual. Conceptually this might also be an okay idea, but honestly I find we have to rewrite evrything from scratch here if we want to create something interesting.

1 - Love for Dismemberment 2 - End it with a Knife 3 - Human Butchery 4 - Stab, Hate, Mutilate

“Sometimes they come back” they say, and it was extremely cool seeing another Unburied released has recently been released! I had a demo tape from this band (which they gently sent for review when the fanzine was still only on paper together with a killer poster) and I picked it from my shelf to give it a quick listen again before hearing this split and see how things have changed. The line up is still the same, but without the original vocalist Rebecca Hawkins (yeah a girl! And that was before Sinister), I wonder where she’s gone now. Whatever. Mark and Matt are now handling the vocals duties too fifty-fifty. The most memorable thing about that demo was not the female vocalist (as guttural as any male by the way), but the spledid artwork of mr. Riddick, which I have seen a few years later tattoed on the arm of Seth Van De Loo (then Centurian, now Severe Torture); Riddick’s work is still phenomenal, and it shows on this Cd too. Even the layout is bare, clean and totally old school. The music too has remained totally “old school”, it sounds really like a declaration of war towards all the modern super-technical bands from the States. The sound is terribly fuzzy and distorted in such a sick way that the amps are croaking and sizzling. The basses aren’t that high however so the resulting sound comes out a bit weird, it just sounds as the original soundwaves were destroyed by deleting all high and bass frequencies so it sounds dirty but not oversaturated, kinda Dark Throne-ish. The vocals are schizophrenic and range from the usual guttural to higher, and the tempos always remain mid paced. The blasts are not really “balsting” but just slight variations on the theme, it just sounds like extremely primeval American Brutal Death when the genre was in embryo ( at the time of Torture Krypt, Judecca, Shredded Corpse etc.). Some riffs have some slam, but generally the tracks don’t sound like a cheap copy of Internal Bleeding‘s, as the whole thing gets a different, DIY, almost amateurish vibe which I tend to appreciate. Not clearly identifiable with anything else, and not properly exciting, but it’s a good change and a look back at some 7-8 years ago, before super technical variations appeared. Noteworthy for the raw recording and excellent layout if not for anything else.

1 - The Beautiful People 2 - Vagina Says 3 - I Do 4 - What She Says 5 - Mushroomheads 6 - Whiskey and Siskey (unreleased demo '87)

Some things to say here. Let’s start from the fact that generally speaking I love noisy fuzz shit a la Anal Cunt, Seven Minutes of Nausea, End of Silence, Pile of Eggs, Minch, Hypo Christians etc., I was very heavily into this genre in the late eigthies and that’s what I was expecting to hear while I got this Anal Nosorog Cd in the mailbox, wrapped like a pork chop withing 2 inches of shrinkwrap. A Mini Cd I’d say, since it’s just 14 minutes long. The whole booklet is a big black and white collage of captions of people in stupid poses and a handful of beautiful Eastern chicks. The statement on the back of the jewelcase is a completely random stream of consiousness of casual thoughts, and the lyrics are, well, ah ah, just “greawww greaww ghghrgrhhgs…”, ahah, like Centinex‘s Death Metal Karaoke. So my idea here was to hear impossibly raw noisecore of the shittiest kind, but when I put the Cd in the player, the thing that came out was completely different from what I expected. Let’s skip the comments about the multimedia tracks you can watch when you read the Cd with a computer (the live shows are nice to see, but the best spot is the penis swordfight with coin-op martial arts game music in the background, I was laughing my guts off, ah ah!). Anal Nosorog isn’t grind in the commonest sense of the word. It is grind for not more than 30 seconds in the whole recording. There is surely an overabundant share of boring loops a la Prodigy/Aphex Twin in here for being a truly raging grind band, seems like these guys wanted to experiment a bit with a midi sequencer, but really “Mushroomheads” and “I Do” are an endless fucking agony to complete. As for the rest of the songs, the songs are made of extremely bare punk riffs with semi-industrial metal turns and a mix of ultra low frog croaks and a few higher more classic screams. The last song is again a bit different, a bid sludgy in the vein of Cock and Ball Torture, but without the bulldozing groove. Summing it up, there is a weird mix of genres in here, and the best part of it all might be the very first song, but to be completely honest, there is just too much a simplicistic use of electronics in here, not to mention the Fudge Tunnel‘s like guitar phrases and acid trip hops. It might even have sounded cool if these things were arranged properly (hailz Skeleton of God), but in the end there is no cohesion between the genres and you don’t even get the idea of schizophrenic drug induced dizziness that earlier Crrepo bands were able to create. Even if I like the spirit, the music isn’t that fun. My problem isn’t that this thing is too stupid or too nonsense, on the contrary, it’s not ENOUGH noisty and wickedly strange! Pump up the volume and add some fucking madness in here, you irresponsible purtridities!

1 - Overthrow the Sphere of Existence 2 - Raging in Unrest 3 - Hated Glory 4 - Wounds of Confusion 5 - Surgical Theater 6 - The Everscathed 7 - Evil Bleeds On 8 - Shackled by Failure 9 - Cries of Damnation's Rebirth 10 - To the Place of Death Begotten [hidden: 11 - Aggressive Perfector (Slayer Cover)]

I have read some people branding this band as old school Death Metal in the vein of Obituary.. well honestly the 2 seconds where the comparison might withstand is at the beginnning of the song “Wounds of Confusion”, and then again I think these vocals are closer to Christian Mertens in the debut of Dark Millenium (what an album is that one) than any John Tardy’s. Anyway… The Everscathed play nice old school Thrash/Death Metal, souding like an American band which is still passing the transition between the two genres in the early 90’s. No shadow of Obituary‘s heavily Celtic Frost – worshipping droning dismal sound is present, but for sure there is a dose of solid riffs that succeed in remaining in a classic mid tempo without sounding weak just like the band from Brandon, which is quite rare nowadays and I bet quite difficult to arrange as well. I am afraid however that they miss the wrapping, dark sound I loved so much in other earlier 90’s Death Metal bands like Decrepit, Baphomet, Rotrrevore etc.so we end up having something like a light version of Death Metal which resides in a strange limbo: neither dark, nor brutal, not groovy nor fast, yet none of the songs are also banal nor stupid, I’d prefere to say ther’re an excellent, heavier Thrash Metal band more than a standard Death Metal one. Any bad remarks would be unfair since the vocals are good (hey check out the hidden “Aggressive Perfector” cover at the end, those vocals are amazing!!) and the song structures effective while very simple. Who knows what would have happened with slightly different sounds, for example with Grave‘s guitar sound and Jorgen’s vocal tune… Again, this album is a good example of straight to the point sincere early Death Metal, but suffers from being painfully middle ground on all fronts. Mid-range vocals, mid-range speed, mid-range distortion (with a headstrong accent on the bass guitar) etc. I feel there is a good potential for advancement but yet there is something that still needs to develop. This is a good choice for lovers of earlier Death Metal more oriented towards song structures than a brutal sound, I think it would be good for people who used to like bands as Abominog, Los Angeles’ Incubus, maybe Deceased or the more recent Occult. The cover artwork and packaging are also sooo deliciously nineties as well. Very simple but not minimalistic, just plain old school. The production is too crisp but then the textures are so wide and clear it would not have suffered much from anything less perfect than this.

1 - Intro: Prelude to Absolute Fornication, Sodomy, Incest and Necrosymphonic Entertainment /Avalanche Fistfuck Fatality 2 - Scatological Nazi Bitch 3 - Vaginator 4 - Relics of Vaginal Obliteration 5 - Vomitwarp 6 - Plasmoid Pussy 7 - Transvaginal Apocalypse 8 - Interlude: Sorbonne Sevahc 777/Droid Clit 9 - The Robocock 10 - Regurgitated Leftovers of Clitoral Carnage 11 - V.U.L.V.A. (The Anti-Gay Brigade) 12 - Celophane Wermacht 13 - Psychosadistic Genital Masticator 14 - Carniwhore 15 - Rancid Discharge of Cryptosexual Fluids 16 - Whoregasmatron 17 - Supersonic Coprophagist 18 - To Mega Clitherion

Judging by the cartoonish appearance of this package it wouldn’t surprise me if Namek was named after the Dragonball’s planet of super warriors similar in look to a manga version of DC Universe’s Martian Manhunter. Ah. Whatever the case this packaging looks splendid. This might be one of the most professional packaging I have ever seen for a gore grind Cd since the last Black Hole releases. Pure good taste and professional work, perfect color schemes, sharp pictures, in a overally clean, balanced design. It is a pleasure to look a professional work once in a while, especially on a small underground label as Poland’s Everydayhate. Namek‘s name was not unfamiliar (already got the Gut cover track and something on tape) but this is the first time I can concentrate on the band fully in over half an hour of groovy, powerful goregrind. The sound here is not sludgy a la Cock and Ball Torture nor dissonantly extreme as Last Days of Humanity or Sublime Cadaveric Compisition: I’d surely say we’re more in the vein of middle-age Neuropathia, just with slightly heavier, pumped up guitar sound and a bit less rock’n’crusty overall approach. What’s sure is that this shit is chock full of energy, probably much influenced by punk contaminations, while standing firmly in Gore Grind ground, with a hugely fat guitar sound and impossibly harmonizer-distorted guttural vocals. There are a few stupid samples here, but they’re luckily kept to a minimum, so you generally get this powerful droning power chords mixing with the vocals in a sticky, cluttered mess of low notes. Bass and guitar have the Dead Infection kind of distortion, so you probably get the point. This is full volume grind with concrete structure, not just noisy fun. Songs are an average of two minutes, so we’re sligtly above the average. This is one of the top lever goregrind bands I’d suggest if one’s adverse to complete fuzzy chaotic gore. There is a coherent structure in the songs and they’re just good for headbanging, even if they lack the blastbeats and methodical dodging of melodies of earlier grind (which is honestly more like my cup of tea). In any case this is a superior release from every angle. Great packaging, great sound, great music. I was just shocked when I was reading the thanklist… I was seriously considering my age when I read this line: “this colossal noise machine started in the long distant year of 1998…” what?? Distant 1998? Oh my… time’s running so fucking fast…