Tag Archives: Grave

The missing Seraphic Decay singles

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I still haven’t got the chance to see the Seraphic Decay book that was recently released despite it’s supposed to hold an interview w/me on the SCAM-033 Absurter Cryst EP that I (re)released last year, so what you read here might be redundant or plain wrong but I thought it might have been interesting to read what kind of thinking I did when looking for a code for this EP.

You might have seen this shirt before. Sic. Only 5 made… And I am not one of the owners. Look at that first Mortician LOGO!

The Absurter Cryst EP has been just a metropolitan tale for several years, but my guess is it could fill the blank in the numbering for SCAM-033. How did it get to SCAM-033? Well, 31 was missing so it could have been any between Nunslaughter, Rotting Christ, or Grave (edit – a friend told me these were supposed to be early releases). We have the SCAM-32 code for Suppuration so the choice was between 31 and 33. Being 33 is also the age of Christ… It was an easy choice. Plus, SCAM-031 was released as a bootleg 2CD compilation from Mexico which took the idea from an interview with O’Bannon, it was quite obvious that 33 was the perfect fit.

Left to right: ltd. Nuclear Abominations, regular Nuclear Abominations, unreleased Seraphic Decay. The ultra-limited edition is a tribute to the Mortician single with a different cover you can see below.

Yosuke is a fucking lucky guy and I am so incredibly envious of this stash he got, I could not sleep for a week boiling with envy when I saw this picture on his Instagram. Unluckily, any attempt to get some extra data on these test pressings has failed, we all crave additional information, in particular if they contain some unreleased EPs?

So where did Nunslaughter, Grave and Rotting Christ end up in the catalog numbering? Unsurprisingly, Nunslaughter ended up as a Hell’s Headbangers single (of course, this information I found in an interview with Don). And my guess is Grave was probably the Tremendous Pain EP. As for Rotting Christ things are more indistinct. Maybe the split with Monumentum? I’d go with “Dawn of the Iconoclast”. My three likely candidates below.

GRAVE “Tremendous Pain” Century Media, 1991

NUN SLAUGHTER “Ritual Of Darkness” Hell’s Headbangers, 2004

Here it’s worth noting that Hell’s Headbangers was anticipated by The Black Vomit which apparently already bootlegged the demo in 1993, WAY before the label was an idea. The cover below looks MUCH better than the HHR version in my opinion.

Another thing that should be noted is that in 2004 Hell’s Headbangers also reissued “The Rotting Christ” and “Impale the Soul” demos on 7″. They would not have been the first time O’Bannon reissued demos on vinyl. However, the year falls within the range so who knows.

ROTTING CHRIST “Dawn of the Iconoclas” Decapitated, 1992

Even though we are a couple of years ahead I get the impression that for Rotting Christ this could have been the idea for an EP on Seraphic Decay. The year before came out a split with Monumentum so maybe they just unpacked The tracks on various items. I have no idea.

Whatever the reality is I will get back on the issue after I finally get my copies of the book which I PREORDERED too when the first press was made but was never contacted. Hmph. Let me have a read and I’ll be back with a follow-up.

PROFANAL (Ita): “Black Chaos” full-length Cd 2012 Iron Tyrant

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Profanal Black ChaosHere it is, we finally delivered. One stays out of the local scene (please don’t start bitching about the use of the word “scene” if you can find another, less sabotaged term to describe a collection of bands playing extreme music within the boundaries of the same country, it’s your problem, not mine) for a decade and when you’re back you suddenly realize your country has produced more great releases in a year than the decade before you started drifting abroad. So this is it: my country is now able to release stuff like this monumental piece of Metal of Death that could as well being recorded in some cheap studios in 1990, with that acrid, crushing sound that was typical of that time (and broadly exploited in books like “Swedish Death Metal” and “Encyclopedia of Svensk Dodsmetall”), by  skinny teenagers dressed in checkered plaid shirts.

Let’s start from the very beginning, though. The packaging is quite nice: we have a tentacled Lovecraftian monster of Seagravean symmetry on cover, and we know that tentacles are very high in the scale of Death Metal subjects. It’s maybe a little bit cartoonish, but I certainly praise the choice of a black and white layout. Hell, you could not go wrong with lineart black and white. Well you can, actually, but this is not the case. Two big surprises await me as I open the booklet. It is 8 pages long (wow, no shitty folding leaflets this time?), and has LYRICS inside. Lyrics, for fuck’s sake, sounds like ages since I read any good ones. The writing may not be the best I have ever read, and sometimes the grammar is not entirely correct or elegant, but here we have DEATH METAL lyrics about suffering, death, grief, zombies, demons – themes that should always be in a Death Metal album. Fuck yes. Thank you, thank you very much.

Soundwise, there is very little to say here, but that is far, far from being a complaint. I might go digging some obscure reference for names of Swedish rehearsal bands of the early nineties, but I suppose Dismember are the greatest and most blatant influence here. I’d dare to go into little more detail and say their sound is a mix of ALL the Dismembers of all eras and not just the early ones (oh and excluding that tragic album I won’t name with the space marine on cover, of course). The uncompromising brutality of Grave is certainly another fitting element of description, as is Carnage‘s hyper-loose riffing and decrepit sound. If I was to play in a band today, I would play this shit, I have no doubts about this. Profanal (which does not stand for Professor Anal if you ask, that might be their pornogrind side project) love real Death Metal and play Death Metal. Swedish Death precisely. They play it with no frills and not a single iota out of place. Metallic, distorted chords with anguishing screams and a bucket of rotten blood smeared all over.

Color me impressed, this is one of the best Death Metal bands we have in this country right now.