Archives: Reviews

1) Slatemic Sounds 2) No Name 3) Roomfullscapes 4) Hey Saroy, show me your guts!

I don’t know if I’m the best to describe such stuff as the one contain herein but I will try. Call me masochist but I tend to like this obsessive, noise only stuff. With a demo titled after SEX PISTOLS (or SORE THROAT?), NAPALMED’s music is the ultimate minimalist stuff, stripped of every resemblance to any kind of “melodic” music you can desperately try to grab to feel safe. Combined in the right pattern, noise can give you emotions, steal your breath, raise your heartbeat just as any other “traditional” band. Since from the first song this NAPALMED tape substantially brings you to the verge of suicide. It’s kind of distant, eerie, and melancholic, with a background fuss which reminds me of a thin rain falling on glistening concrete… metallic clacking and tedious tickling add the background for what is like a huge rasping breath which come and goes in waves. There are lots of “instruments” used here, if you want to call them that way, which add variety to the music with a plethora of different sonorities. At times the sound grows to be a bit more like heavy boots pummelling the ground, at times it’s just like hearing your TV fizzling out of tuning. At time it’s just like a blank lp spinning erratically. The curious thing about this demo is that it DOESN’T sound electronic at all even if made mainly with keyboards and percussions, it just don’t involve techno beats or stuff you can picture when thinking of a noise band. It’s just NOISES, arranged to create a grim arabesque, like a sculpture made of pipes and black sewer stones, not dazzling circuitry if you know what I mean… Oh well, time for me to go to sleep. Trippy stuff.

1) Rebellion...Revolution!!! 2) Mutilando Falsi Sorrisi... 3) Black Sickness 4) ... Sconfiggendo l’orribile Masey 5) Anti-Jubilaeum

I should recognize that this band is rather abysmal and obsessive, which is something I basically like in the genre. No guitar masturbation, no pretty melodies at all, but despite the stern approach this Black Metal doesn’t really stir suicide impulses in me. It’s not like hearing DEMONCY or ABRUPTUM is you know hat I mean, it’s not THAT bleak… it’s just like hearing ugly Black Metal with lots of overlapping whispers. The vocals are so piercing your eardrums tend to microwave (I have had a few listen with earphones) anyway, which can appeal as well as not, but the guitars are the real weak spot in the whole project, they just don’t arrange the right mood, my opinion being even if you want it raw, you still need some good riff to play with and bring on for 20 straight minutes. But these riffs just too often wobble and totter too slowly, as if they had no real toehold. I would add to the bad points that I am not very much for the guitar sound they adopted, for the (sort of) solos, the neo-Swedish melodies in Chapter IV. The first track in side b has some interesting arrangements with whispering and evil rasping, and the grindlike larsens add some barbarity to the basic riffing, but I don’t think I’ll give it a few more listens in the future. Just need some more fine-tuning.

1) The Vile Sores in Urticariothocism Goulashed Decrepitance 2) Gribbled Maggotized Pregnant Inside into a Fetid Renal Sarna 3) In the Acro Cianotic Post-Cloning Ectopysm

The songs on this tape are nothing but tracks one and eight from “Chronic Corpora Infest” and a track from “Forensick” re-released as tapes by Naru of Obliteration/CSSO. The mixing is good even thought these tracks are presented here in self-financed, self-recorded versions. Of course you know DISGORGE so I won’t go too much in detail here, but if you don’t have a clue about the band, think of it as the ultimate aberration, DISGORGE is gorewise the most gruesome band I can come up with, I can’t really stuff them as grind nor as death metal, maybe something in between… Deathgrind? The guitar/drum combination is constantly changing, getting opposite, twisting like a live body subject to dissection. Some of the inescapable, gloomy, claustrophobic feel remind a bit of the CARCASS of the “I Reek of Putrefaction” golden era, although even tighter if possible at all. The vocals are bubbling, phlegmy, confuse, it’s just a maelstrom of insane pathological splatter holocaust brought to the limits of listenablity . Add some samples to break the songs even (not cheap overused ones though, it’s just some stuff that add some decrepit, anxious feel) and you get a three songs sample of what DISGORGE could actually do in full-length. Should I add this is one of my favorite bands?

1) Rx Intro 2) An army of ghoulish fiends in slumber 3) Nightpraise/Nightdrone 4) … and as they dream… 5) Secludere 6) Universal cosmic damnation 7) … rising… 8) Prelude/Through Dysthymia 9) Lucia 10) Magine Bugs 11) Diatribe 12) Secludere II (outro)

The fact that this bands busted out of the corpse of a noise-experimental band like RAISED IN MEAT could just nothing but help. Especially when you consider this is a project all centred around vaguely ambient/psychedelic atmospheres and stripped of everything Black Metal. It’s a droning, mesmerizing, obsessive repetition of loose riffs over and over for minutes, it’s the kind of stuff that’s created to drive you nuts, filling your cervix with desolation and bareness, and drains you of your warmth second by second. There is a lot of clean guitar and crepitating Greek-black-metal-when-it-was-good abandoned feel. It’s not gothic stuff, it’s fucking grey and miserable and I was enjoying the fact that luckily for my nerves, it had no vocals on it. After a while when it really gets trippy, some of the dirtiest, most fundamental, barren Black Metal I have ever heard starts. There’s no beauty in this shit, just ugly bleak stuff which no man with good sense should hear. Spectral vocals submerged in an horrible mix, echoing beneath the same riff over and over, it’s like techno-trance meets industrial black metal. I don’t think you should but it. But being nuts myself. I liked it. Especially when high on heroine.

For your knowledge, SECLUDERE have now changed name to DEAD TO EARTH.

1) Divine Chosen 2) I’m the living swear 3) Eternal Damnation

This demo substantially starts from the point where the last one ended, with even more apocalyptic hyperblasts, more hate, and vocals which have gained a thicker coat of phlegm and a broader range of pitch. The whole identity of the band has grown even stronger. The droning, mesmerizing guitars have now become even more undulating, improving on those abrupt changes which introduced the solos, now become one unique surge of grindcore-speed riffs while still sounding metal to the heart. It’s like they added 5 notes per second, encapsulated some solos in the music itself and begun exploring the boundaries of chaos with a churning mass of technical-uneven guitar-drum rhythms and guttural yet very distinctive singing. There is a fair addition of melodies as well, backed by the best solos ever from an Italian band that I can recollect of (how many DM bands still play solos to this day in my country? Not many that I can mention, the best one having been right AIWAZ from the same city as GHOULS, and that was 8 years ago). If you mind me, this is one of the three best “unadulterated” Death Metal bands from my country today. Address above.

1) Ghouls 2)Rebaptized in Blasphemy 3) My life for your death

I have to pronounce only good things about this demo because these GHOULS are a goddamned running kick in the groin if you overtake my poetic license. To talk about pure facts, I didn’t really expect a demo as good as this from an Italian band, having more or less been convinced by just 4 or 5 others in all of the last five-year-cycle. That said, GHOULS came at all unexpected. While in the overall following the well worn schemas of Brutal Death Metal, they luckily didn’t fall into the usual slam-syndrome most of our national bands seem to love so drearily, instead privileging the speed, the blasting drumbeats, the caveman vocals and the frantic solos to crush your skull instead of going searching after the ultimate two step riff. GHOULS plays a Death Metal full to the brim with these barbaric elements, the guitar curling neurotically to fast speeds, just to drop in MORBID ANGEL-esque contortions adorned with strands of nihilistic solos just to pummel some more Brutishness straight in the speakers a second later. Very fast tempos which might remind DEEDS OF FLESH in sheer structural architecture (fast, fast, some syncopated cadence for a few seconds then fast again), yet GHOULS tend to be a bit repetitive in the quicker parts but this might be just a choice, if it’s effective in adding speed to the tape, it’s up to you, as for me, color me positively impressed.

1) Clostridium (Brown Pus) 2) Exssanguing the Innocent 3) Ritual Suicide 4) Congenital Deformity 5) Helmithemeal Regurgitation 6) Obscene Dissection 7) Severe Phagomania

It’s quite encouraging that a band like this comes from Gothenburg considering the only Death Metal person I know from the City today writes for a fanzine (Barbaric Poetry). But Gothenburg has its share of surprises and life teaches us that a grind flower can blossom inside melodic concrete. LUTEOUS is a one-man band, of loose grind fibre, with some crust tarnishing and lots of samplings to introduce each song. The drum machine while somewhat basic and cold doesn’t really overheat as many of the demo remain in the hammering mid tempos IMPETIGO taught us to appreciate, with just a few bursts in the middle… I can point out VISCERA for instance, regarding the grinding parts. The vocals are the most peculiar thing, malignant and high-frequency closer to ORDER FROM CHAOS than to CARCASS in my opinion, but always somewhat goregrind, and with an old-school feel. Tracks are quite short and the whole demo ends up pretty soon, I guess (and hope) that I’ll get to hear from the band not too far way on the future.