I got this promo Cd a couple of months ago with a letter that stated “we play goregrind”. Actually I think the band is certainly brutal but I won’t rate this music as pure goregrind, despite the hyperblasts and the super-guttural vocals, as the metal inlfuence here is definitely too big. Would you rate bands like Enmity as “goregrind”?
In any case let’s start with the packaging: I really dig the twisted cover art that looks like some deranged mix of Miguel Ángel Martín and Turkka G. Rantanen, it certainly sets the stage for something sick. The booklet is non-existant as it’s just 2 pages and the inner fold contains just the logo, but I think overally this minimalistic style is OK. What’s interesting is that there is no tracklist whatsoever, just like our old beloved Sublime Cadaveric Decomposition.
Like I stated before, here we are in front of some experimental kind of extreme, chaotic grinding Brutal Death in the vein of Enmity or Intense Hammer Rage. While the meaning of the term grindcore certainly shifted during the last 20 years, I still figure of it as a genre that should have a combination of very raw and dark sound, and borderline dissonant riffs, and most of all, being totally unaware of what’s going on. Despite the speed and multiple layers of sound the musicians here seem to always be in control of what is happening. I like the whirlwind guitarwork as well as the furious blasting however, as these guys really know how to fill all the corners of sound. Mix in some heavily distorted vocals and you get a bleeding carcass mutilated by a million razords for the lovers of the genre. All of the songs are very short, between 1 and 2 minutes in length, but they still manage to throw in some interesting variations.
Bowel Fetus was a band active for a couple of years from 2004 to 2008 which concocted a weird mix of Doom and Goregrind. Glen, the man behind this project, was so kind to send me a couple of promo Cds together with some old stuff I ordered from him at the time. Even if the band is probably dead by now (Glen if you read this, get in touch!) I feel like reviewing these two albums just because fuck you, that’s why, the band was awesome. And besides, it had a really nice logo.
Bowel Fetus / Offal (Aus/Bra) “Putr-essence” split Cd 2008 The Hole
Offal is the only still active band among those featured in this post. I don’t know how much Andrè from Lymphatic Phlegm considers it a side project rather than a fully certified band, but in any case this stuff is quite good. He started Offal as a tribute to Autopsy and Impetigo, but I could dare to say they don’t really sound much like neither, except for the horror movie samples. If I had to attempt some comparison, they really sound like some of those old Carcass-inspired demo bands from Scandinavia (or Fennoscandia) of the late 80’s-early ’90s like demo-era Xysma or Traumatic, clearly less “pathological” than these. Most of the songs are mid tempos and the varied use of vocals is decently done. While I definitely dig the genre, I think Offal lacked here a bit in pure sewage tase in the arrangements.
Bowel Fetus here deploys two tracks of his top-level Gore/Doom in the vein of Catasexual Urge Motivation meets Autopsy meets dISEMBOWELMENT and you know, for a one man band this stuff was definitely good. Just like CUM, slow crushing riffs seem to linger forever just to be replaced by furious Mortician-like blasts all the while floating on our beloved sick Autopsy dissonance . What’s more impressive in my opinion is that while certainly the songs are not overly complex, Glen doesn’t throw in a single wrong note in these tracks.
The case is cardboard which means start looking for a plastic film as soon as possible if you get it because it gets ruined very fast. The sleeve contains also a lyricsheet which is quite unusual these days, at least for Offal, since Bowel Fetus, afaik, has no lyrics. Oh and the disc itself is a beauty, red both sides.
Ah, FMD, one of my favorite underground labels. Pure DIY mentality and lots of musical deranged psychosis. Fecal Matter grabbed Canadian goregrinder due Canker and Bowel Fetus for one hell of a spliit here.
Bowel Fetus opens up their side whose cover this time delves less into gore and more into sick scat-urine imagery. The sound itself is here also extremely deep, rough and bass-heavy. with a weird background noise similar to some electronic component gone awry. I really like thes etracks, possibly the best, heavier and sicker Bowel Fetus recorded. While the slow Disembowelment/CUM bridges are present in the second song “Clown Suck”, Glen decided to go knee deep into the goregrind soundscape here, maybe as an homage to the label. Te vocals are too a deep liquid yet very low gurgle, perfect for the job. All in all this is a flawless recording.
Canker’s story, for those new to the name, is seriously spine-chilling as both members of this band committed suicide in respectively years 2006 and 2007. Their sound changed quite a bit over time and these tracks are a bit on the noisy/garage side with one of the strangest mixes I have heard especially for the percussions. Songs are typically 1 minute average with a bass-guitar sound that is more like a broken string but at least apart from the trademark goregrind vocals everything here is played with real instruments, so much so you hear “recording” sounds in the background at the start of every song. I have listened to so many bedroom goregrind projects over the years that hearing honest garage sewer shit makes me feel almost nostalgic.
The packaging is the typical FMD CD-r with home-made color xeroxed covers in a plastic sleeve. Both bands recorded urine and scat-themed songs for this split, and the cover artwork corresponds.
Here we have a tasty little package from this relatively young Spanish label specialized in goregrind, cybergrind and gorenoise. This splendidly bloody package includes
ECR7 VV.AA.:”50 Years Of Gore (1962-2013)” compilation Cd 2013 (this is also a free download)
ECR 9 Cannibe/Septic Autopsy/Infected Gastroenteritis “3 way of Infected Autopsy into the Cannibalism” 3 way split Cd 2013
ECR12 Necropodridal Cadaveric (Arg) “Recolección De Regurgitaciones Putrefactas” Cd-r 2013
– Cunt Pus Ingurgitator (USA): “Impulse To Fuck A Headless Whore” Cd-r 2013
50 Years Of Gore (1962-2013)
Reviewing compilations is always a pain in the ass, and when they contain so many bands it gets nigh-impossible to properly cover them all, so have a listen at the whole thing on YouTube (only 1 song per band, the Cd-r contains more) or download it straight from the label’s website. My copy is numbered so if you want to order the physical one for you, be fast: only 50 have been made. I have no clue what 1963 stands for as the picture on the cover looks like a frame from Bad Taste, but here it is, 50 years of gore!
This compilation has a little bit of everything. Some of the bands have a slightly more Brutal Death feel like Gruesome Bodyparts Autopsy, Losteror or Clogged Orifice, others are more radical gorgrind such as Melanoma, Fungus Infection or Dash the Brain Out, while others yet are stricly cyber grind such as Urethrorroea, Clostridium Difficile Infection, Dr. Aochider and Urophilia (clearly inspired by Libido Airbag) and yet some more deranged stuff like this freaked out Anaric feat. Mr. Pin (?) or noisegore as Terrato Naso Coprophiliac Algolagnia. My favorites in this sea of shit are probably the inenarrable Hydropneumothorax, good cyber shit, and the noisy Turulopsis Glabrata and Ascaris Lumbricoides. But really, there are few weak spots here. All in all this compilation is excellent from start to end.
Cannibe/Septic Autopsy/Infected Gastroenteritis “3 Ways of Infected Autopsy into the Cannibalism”
Cannibe is a somewhat prolific band from my country playing some kind of raw, almost garageish goregrind that reeks of bile and disscted homo sapiens. I’d dare to say they have that un-groovy, bulldozer crunch of earlier Dead Infection. We don’t really have that many completely human lineups in this genre today so I am always eager to hear new stuff from them. The seven tracks included in this split are taken live and decorously walk the thin line of totally tape rehearsal sound thanks to their really thick sound that stays distinct all the time despite the obvious limits of the recording gear. There are certainly no virtuosisms in goregrind (thanksfully) and the combination of good equipment and the simplicity of the songs pan out a couple of neat, intelligible tracks foir a total of about 10 minutes. Just as a note – one of the seven tracks is a Haemorrhage cover.
Septic Autopsy from Mexico I know little about except a past release on Human Discount records, but I definitely love this shit. Somehow bands from the southern states always manage to recreate a real musical massacre properly mixing an intricate stop and go madness of churning riffs and gargling vocals. They migth remind a bit of a more goregrindish, earlier Disgorge, with their amazing atonal and unpredictable and yet brutally in your face intermittent tempo changes. This is one of those bands that makes you feel what it is to shove your hand in a blender with a nasty sick, dense sound and not a single second of breath.
Infected Gastroenteritis from Greece has definitely stronger “digital” or “cyber” component compared to the previous two. While Septic Autopsy too use a drum machine it does not sound as artificial as it sounds in these tracks. The vocals are an heavily distorted roar, oscillating above a carpet of hyperfast drum machine beats. There are also a couple of samples between the songs but they don’t overlap with the tracks, they’re just used to separate the short songs. While the first tracks are more noisy a la Autophagia (just to stay in the neighborhood) the last ones explore the territory of liquid-gorenoise like Urine Festival and Tumour. This is a band which probably hasn’t explored its full potential.
Necropodridal Cadaveric
Necropodridal Cadaveric is a brand new band from Argentina and as far as I know this might be their only official release available at the moment, which luckily collects also their 2007 demo and a previously released split EP (with SESOS TRITURADOS). The most relevant thing about this album is the absolute primitivity of the songs. The structure stripped to a minimum and the drumming blasting basically with no precise direction chumming up with cricket vocals in short bursts averaging one minute or so. I like the barbarism and almost vulgar austerity of these songs even though I am not much into the cricket style vocals which better fit US slam bands which is a genre I don’t follow much. The vocals however are not always as static as a boulder, and when the slightly more open roar chime in, the recipe works rather well. For some reason I found myself enjoying even more the older demo tracks which have a low quality, sick texture which if fundamental for this genre. There are also a couple of bonus tracks at the end with a different sound than the earlier ones, probably recorded in a live session. Good shit, anyway.
The Cd packaging is rather good, like the other Emocaust releases, being a collection of decomposing corpses and rough surgical dissections.
Cunt Pus Ingurgitator
Here is another 50+ tracks from that morbidly prolific guy known as Bob Macabre (including a previous 2012 demo “Slicing A Corpses Vagina”. This guy has released more albums, demos and splits in the past two years than Nun Slaughter, Sabbat and Agathocles combined. This means at least that he is aware of the sound he wants to recreate. His project CPI is pure gorenoise, the kind of stuff that a dozen years ago could have been released by Fecal Matter Discorporated. I generally enjoy this shit: it is chaotic, noisy, chock full of imprecisions of mistakes that add consistency rather than spoiling the songs. Thanks to these leaks and imprecisions the music raises to a level of variety that the drum machine could never guarantee. “Impulse To Fuck A Headless Whore” is a bit faster and way less varied than stuff from, say Anal Birth or Biocyst to name two, but the songs are so short (the whole Cd-r is 33 minutes long) that this is scarcely an issue. For lover or multilayered noise with a porn-gore imagery.
I don’t really order many fanzines today. I want to rationalize my free time and considering I read a lot of shit online, the time on my armchair is usually reserved for books. In any case I was intrigued by this A5 (or its non-ISO equivalent) small paper called Codex Obscurum. I am generally tempted by shiny things and the cover art on these last two issues looked pretty tempting, since this day and age you can order stuff in a couple of clicks, here is my first electronic order of a paper fanzine (I did some trades, but as far as I remember, I always did those through e-mail, that doesn’t really qualify).
The idea is interesting. The fanzine is short and there is a shitload of contributors to each issue (a dozen or so) each one of which writing a very short piece for the publication, be it an interview, but also a couple of interesting articles (and other not so interesting, the one on the Neseblod shop was definitely aimless – at the end of the article all I could say is “so what?”). In general, I like the “mashup” concept of releasing short, almost newsletter-like ‘zines with a little bit of everything. Except for a few band which I loathe with passion (Saint Vitus, Midnight, Death In June) I generally appreciate 90% of the content here. Being a roleplayer myself I also found interesting, for example, the intie with Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The interviews are neither very original nor very exciting, but there is some crunch to be learned from each anyway.
Two things I strongly disliked: the choice of the paper and the general layout, and secondly the steep price. Even if 3 USD might not sound like much, there was a point 10 or 15 years ago where fanzines with 10 times the content in these were FREE, like Metal Core. 10 USD for shipping 20 pages of text is not cheap. Regarding the layout the choice of the paper is the worse I have seen in years. And considering both issues are printed on this shit I concluded it was not just an error, but made on purpose. The pages are so thick and slick that you can barely turn them, they just slip from your fingers. The layout too, is overally decent, but some background images are computer files with a low definition so you end up seeing big pixels and jagged borders. I might be an old grumbler but if you go for the analog feel, you better do it properly from start to end.
My overall judgement on these two issues is good anyway. Even if there are a couple of things that just don’t fit my tastes. Some interviews raise the stake like the one with Riddick or Father Befouled. Consider it the perfect fit for reading on the toilet, lots of quick articles and interviews that last just a shit, instead of the usual Snakepit 10-page monsters.
You might have noticed there is a big mess, especially in the archive of the oldest reviews. I am upgrading and working a bit on the background of this website lately and I am trying to import all the reviews from the old server (over 700!) but something seems to be broken. The latest post should work OK anyway, so you might not even notice except for a few ugly details on the layout of the blogzine. I am too lazy to properly arrange things so that I will upgrade all at once, as it is way easier to work this way. Please be patient.
They handed me this tape promoting it as “death/black” and while I ever married any genre Death/Black Metal generally speaking works for me. Not this time tough. I like raw and primitive, but what I mean when I say that is generally raw and primitive as in Von, not as in “college rehearsal”, eh.
The be completely honest there is nothing entirely out of place here, barring, ahem, the riffs. These songs (I am not sure if this is a promo tape or a tape album) could be summarized as Hellhammer playing Death Metal in a rehearsal room with session member from the local garage punk band. While primitive and graced with really good death vocals (hell yes, good mix of raspy and deep), the Motorhead-like pull isn’t really working out well here, it just doesn’t click. This, coupled with the kind of rehearsal sound that spoils the thickness of the sound instead of giving it an edge of rawness, summarize a scarce 5 points in my book. The concept is good, and the idea of bringing early Hellhammer-like metal into Death Metal ground is cool, but I would rather start chopping off the sloppier riffs and keep just the better ones.
EDIT: I got confirmation that this is actually a “demo” tape.
I usually don’t like to combine reviews but here is a first taste of how the new Nuclear Abomination is going to work: way less structure, more feel, less detail. Besides, I was about to switch the blog-zine to Italian until yesterday but analyzing the stats it seems the broad majority of the readers that have not abandoned the webzine (like I did, ah eh) are from other countries, so English has to be..
Anyway back to Abhorrot: great guys with lot of patience since I got this advance over a a year ago. Besides having among the best great dripping and festering logos these guys have reserched and absorbed the aesthetics of minimal Death Metal with great care. I had a glimpse of the cover art for the MLp on their website and it sure looks great. The 7″ too has the bare minimum. As usual, less is more and hacking away at superfluous stuff can’t but be an improvement. It’s just a pity the artwork on the 7″ is so dark, I could barely understand what is represented and the logo almost disappears in the shades (there is also a very big problem in the cover art as well – the resolution is fucked up and the artwork is grossly depixelated).
Sticking to the concept of minimalism, their music can’t really be described otherwise but minimalist, and that’s still another plus in my book. The sound is so dissonant and weirdly tuned that it sounds like a constant buzz, like a Death Metal version of Gonkulator or something. Once you resign this drone-like carpet of sound, the vocals also suddently spring out and are quite raspy and coarse. I don’t know if this is a pre-mix, but the sound is so abrasive that even Order From Chaos would sound polished. The songs on the MLp differ quite a bit from those of the 7″ (or the previously reviewed Cd-r demo by the way), the sound being even more noisy and indistinct, but at the same time a bit more intricate. I personally prefere the ones on the 7″, which have a darker, fuller sound, still adehering to the precepts of mono-riffing. In any case you must have in mind that this stuff is RAW, fuck, very VERY raw, it’s not your average last minute old-school band. I had this kind of sensations when I first heard Voivod, or Revenge. They also make a good and spare use of samples. All in all good Death/Noise shit.
8+ for the Ep and 8 for the Mini.
Get in touch with Terrorghoul Productions for the 7″ (limited to 500) or Yersinia Pestis for the MLp. I am getting a copy too.
