Archives: Reviews

Maybe the most prominent project by the grindcore veteran Adam Rotella (I have been reading his name around since forever) that adds to his endless list with LIQUEFIED MAGGOTS, DEFLESHED BY FLIES, GROTESQUE DEFORMITIES, BONDED FLESH and the list goes on for years. ANAL BIRTH plays goregrind that borders the farthest extremes of pure noise. The sound is more than simply garage, it sounds as if it rained all night on the speakers, and they were recording with rusty jacks. Maximum speed drum machine, and so much pitch-shift that make the vocals sound like an elephant lament brings you possibly to the loudest grind/noise from US, absolutely as extreme as the fittest Japanese madmen. Beware that guitars and bass arer almost non-existent, this shit is absolutely minimalistic. if you aren’t afraid to lose a coupla bucks give them a chance, but I repeat, this is very very extreme.

1) Inhuman Autopsy 2) Merciless Strangulation 3) Carnage in Heaven

Sweden’s STRANGULATION might be the closest sounding thing to the CANNIBAL CORPSE of “Butchered at Birth” we ever had from Scandinavia. At a first listen I would have catlogued the demo as just another American-inspired heavily “mosh” Death Metal, yet there are these heavy, rolling, cadenced, guitars and characteristic tempos which were main property of our Buffalo zombie heroes, saturated with gore and highly claustrophobic. Of all the bands playing today instead, none would possibly fit better than the American PUTRILAGE for comparison, being themseves more or less the continuation of the CANNIBALs Barnes era. Elgh from the band BUTCHERY appears as a session vocalist in the demo so I will better concentrate on songwriting only for the following review. We have here a huge, dense guitar sound (doesn’t sound like a demo at all) and constantly stopped riffs that just alternate between mid to slow tempos, with the occasional burst but still not overly fast, as if speed would damage the balance of heaviness of the entire music work. Despite we never get too fast, the music doesn’t drop to boring slam, however. For a demo, the packaging is really superb, I can’t understand if it’s some high resolution print or a professional booklet, in any case the artwork and layout for the Cd are real good, too. Technically ineccepible although doesn’t transmit too much energy. Should be ripe in an year or two.

1) Bleeding Anxiety 2) Infatuated With Sickening Thoughts 3) Deprived of Humanity 4) Last Rites of the III Content 5) Behind the Green Door

DISLIMB plays ultra-heavy, I mean, impossibly heavy Brutal Death roughly fashioned after the new American school sonorities, yet if you are expecting another BRODEQUIN clone you’re on the wrong way to identify DISLIMB. DISLIMB is not constantly fast as a rocket, on the contrary it shows its full potential in the slower pounding mid-slow tempos, where the gargling grunts reach the deepest and the guitar tone scratches the bottom of the human ear range of frequencies. Despite the monstrous drummer (from BRODEQUIN, eh), even the fastest parts are not taken to the limit of speed, so that the music remains ripe with consistency and wholly identifiable, not just a blur of notes. Sure there are the classic tremolos and the mega-chunky breath-stripping three-notes-per-minute riffs, but this is a demo that’s right more than a combination of slams and hyperblasts. There is class and competence that hover on the music and arrange the different parts into a puzzle of concrete, credible Death Metal. The overall heaviness remind me a bit of SHREDDED CORPSE demo-era, TORTURE KRYPT, first DEEDS OF FLESH album, GORGASM and so on, you got the idea by now. What can I say, even if you’re not into cold, unemotional US Brutal Death I would give this a chance, it’s a demo that has more body and soul than a ton others.

1) Coming Back To Life 2) Grand Guignol Cannibale 3) L'aldila 4) Savage Men... Savage Beasts 5) Bizzare Sacrifice 6) Enchanted Bodies 7) Zombified Crowd 8) Cannibal Freakout 9) Skull Collectors Of Borneo 10) The Gruesome Horror Begins 11) Jungle Rites 12) Kwaheri 13) Spaghetti Terror 14) Black Demons 15) Malignant Virus Infection 16) Deep River Savages 17) Somewhere At An Altar 2 18) Jungles Of The Matto Grosso 19) Vodoo Ritual 20) Zombie Wizard 21) Last Men Alive 22) One More Victime 23) Mondo Chelano 24) In The Cold 25) Lost In The Green Hell 26) El Lamento De Los Zombies 27) Prisoner Of The Cannibal God 28) Cinema Verite Style 29) Eaten Alive 30) It’s The End Of The World

Gods burn me if this intro is not a great CARCASS “Genital Grinder” ripoff ah ah. Great shit in any case. Whether IMPALED, GHOUL and EXHUMED grab mercilessly from CARCASS’s “Symphonies of Sickness” and a little bit of the following last album (“Necroticism”, after which, sadly, the band split up), GRUESOME STUFF RELISH are a living praise of the primeval gore grinding grind of that masterpiece that was “Reek of Putrefaction” (which was actually the repress of their last demo oh well, just for your trivia nights). “Teenage Giallo Grind” sounds like a big concept tribute to gore with the capital “G”, with continuous citations from golden age sleazy flicks (the bandmates surnames are respectively Argento, Deodato, Kemper, two directors and a serial killer…). Read the Song titles and tell me how many fucking Horror B-movies you can identify among them goddammit. Even if they were not movie titles they could easily be, with all those vodoo rites, jungles and zombies. What music could have better restated all this grand guignol holocaust of 70’s splatter than good old fashioned grind? None of course. Malign, catharrous vocals which twist around the songs like spasms of headless snakes, super-tight guitars, and those delicious, melliflous solos that sound like honey upon a grey, livid corpse. Add to this a perfectly “Uncle Creepy”-reminiscent cover that make PURULENT SPERMCANAL’s look new school and you’ll get why I was completely raped by this Cd. Top pick.

1) Corpus Vermis 2) Circle of Mania 3) The Stom of Coming 4) Khem 5) Doom of Man 6) Blood of Chaos 7) Curse of Aeons 8) The Chasm 9) Cries of the Damned

KAAMOS’ successfully achieved objective for this debut sounds definitely that to recapture all the grandeur of the original Swedish Death Metal sound. After a seven inch and two demos the band have proven ready for a record deal. Hell yes. This self titled Cd is permeated by a sound that is early speed/death Death Metal to the bone without any kind of soft Metal influences, grindcore or whatesoever, not as distorted as GRAVE or DISMEMBER, nor as classically pompous as ENTOMBED. Pure Death in its very essence, with distorted yet not overly low vocals as it was custom among the initiators. To define and constrain KAAMOS as a retro band would be somewhat limiting however. Death Metal itself is ageless, being the incarnate form of all that is supremely dark and the uttermost extreme. Although styles and influences have come and gone with the passage of time, the real core of this music has always stayed the same, and well, I guess KAAMOS just tried to strip all the gloss that was accumulated in the past 10 years in puny attempts to make it look nicer for the big crowd, and re-exposed its putrid face to Earth.

It sounds as if the best of efforts have been made to make every single riff, every single arrangement studied and recalculated a hundred times to have this album as compact and structured as possible. Fast and upbeat from start to end, this is brutal shit as it was meant in the beginning of our times. The main pity is that the promo didn’t come with any lyrics thay look quite interesting as well. Speed and structures can roughly be reminiscent of UNLEASHED “Where no Life Dwells” era yet this was much more evident in the latest red demo than in this full length, which is more complex, more organic. The dark artwork, the obscure, magick lyrics fit more that hybrid plasma of Death/Black metal that was before the whole scene splintered in separated, backstabbing trends (and my laugh of scorn goes to Black Metal first, which instead of sounding more and more extreme with its departure, has just become weaker and weaker by losing its older half, with its ludicrous weak sounds, and ridicolous monkey vocals). GROTESQUE and SADISTIC INTENT can’t but spring to mind at least on a purely stylistical level, which are not bad bands to cite in a review are they?