Oggi il Dottor Marciume ascolta: Repulsive Feast “Brewing Rancid Stew” 7″, honest horrror Death Grind from Germany, Lycanthropic Chants 2019.
Horror inspired Death Metal is probably my favourite stuff and all intentions are good on this 7″, including the retro 1990 layout, which however feel quite awkward and slightly out of place on deluxe glossy paper. Also I have the general impression that the layout is thriving to capture some aesthetic that’s not really in place here (same thing I’d dare to say about Cryptic Brood, to be honest, but also works for Undergang). Repulsive Feast play uptempo, sometimes sloppy (in a good way) ugly Death Metal with some early swedish vibes, all in all much better than Cryptic Brood with whom they share drummer and label (run by the drummer btw). The sound was a bit rawer and I enjoyed it a bit more on the previous demo tape (which I’d rate 8 skulls full of guts) but manages to sound tight enough.
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.
Among the various albums I got for review lately this must certainly be the absolute worse. Basically everything in this album is wrong in my agenda, everything. Once I recovered from the shock of seeing this is not the Brazilian Gore (as I expected, my hopes were crushed by the cover art the very second I picked the Cd out of the envelope) it took me just a few seconds to stare at the Cd, a digipack so glossy it looks oily. You got a scattering of pictures about sexual perversion scattered on the layout going from dildos, latex-wrapped whores, blasphemous images of Jesus, streaks of blood and so on. Not only however the Cd doesn’t come with lyrics but the very titles of the songs are in broken English.
While the overall layout is harmonic and certainly a result of some professional designer it is the music that is just tragically bad. G.O.R.E. plays a disastrous patchwork of death/grind with among the worse vocals I have ever heard since Caninus or Anael (eheh). The growls are little more than dog barks, and in a pitiful attempt to quote Macabre they even manage to make it worse with Mickey Mouse choruses. The songs themselves have some decent groove in them sometimes (remind me a bit of late Neuropathia) but just as some good massive riff comes in another sloppy one intrudes and then those terrible, terrible vocals just spoil everything. I will not mention the last track, some sort of disco-remix that probably will make someone laugh. But – me – I personally think I just lost some minutes of my life.
How could a band like this get signed is really beyond me. If they ever managed to somehow kick out the vocalist(s?) and truncate all these shitty moshpit chugs in between, something good could be harvested from this shit, but I have little hope in that. Sorry, it was a pity since the label has been producing good stuff in the past, and this is probably the only updated review you are seeing in a long time. But stay away from this stuff, very FAR.
