Category Archives: USA

Emocaust records’ newest goregrind and gorenoise releases

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Emocaust records promo package.

Here we have a tasty little package from this relatively young Spanish label specialized in goregrind, cybergrind and gorenoise. This splendidly bloody package includes

  1. ECR7 VV.AA.:”50 Years Of Gore (1962-2013)” compilation Cd 2013 (this is also a free download)
  2. ECR 9 Cannibe/Septic Autopsy/Infected Gastroenteritis “3 way of Infected Autopsy into the Cannibalism” 3 way split Cd 2013
  3. ECR12 Necropodridal Cadaveric (Arg) “Recolección De Regurgitaciones Putrefactas” ‎Cd-r 2013
  4. – 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.

MISERY INDEX (USA): “Ruling Class Canceled” split Cd with MUMAKIL 2007 Power It Up

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Oh come on. Is that really an half skeletal corporate man with a bunch of oppressed black victims against an American flag on the cover? Don’t they really ever get tired of that stuff? I seriously think I got my full share with Brutal Truth‘s debut, and that was 20-something years ago. Seriously, the booklet is fine, but the lyrics here sucks worse than some teenager punk band from some obscure burg in the rocky center of Italy. Well that’s worth for Misery Index at least, as I can see no Mumakil lyrics in here. I’ll spare the suffering of discussing what the subjects of these lyrics are about, you can grab any Dead Kennedys record and get something a million times better written.

Contrary to Brutal Truth, however, which even on the first album had string grindcore influences, I can hear nothing I can call even fairly grind in Misery Index. I really wonder what the fuck everyone is listening at these days and dare to call grind fucking core. This band have the fattest motherfucking sound ever, so clean and crisp you can use it to cut pepperoni for your pizza. They even have some chunky reminiscences of Dying Fetus (well that cannot be considered a falut, I guess Jason probably contributed a little bit to his old band’s sound), grunts and all. All this rant says basically nothing so far, bit that’s just because I could not force myself to find anything remotely interesting in this recording. Average seems to be the fitting term here, superbly average fast, modern, American-styled Death Metal full of all those accelerations and barking. Not my cup of tea.

As for Mumakil, things get a litytle bit more complex. They have some extra layers of screams and grunts, probably some less refinement in their songwriting which I can’t but appreciate, yet they still sound as uninteresting as a band can be. Considering they take the name from a Middle Earth creature, share the same cover as Misery Index, and print no lyrics, their music is all I can rely on to identify what the personality of the band is. And at the third listen, I still cannot distinguish this stuff from a billion other records. Sure, they seriously kicked Misery Index ass on this split, but we’re still far from being memorable even for a single second.

I cannot say anything band about this split, but I can’t say anything good either. 7″s are cool however, and this Cd has been pressed on wax of different color. Does that count?

LEGIONS OF ASTAROTH (USA): “The Moon Bleeds Red Upon the Earth” split Cd-r with HELLGOAT 2005 Vile Art

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I was not hugely impressed by Hellgoat and by jove, I am underwhelmed by Legions of Astaroth as well. Like I said before fuzzy sound is by no means a turn down for me, but the kind of music this band is playing definitely could gain some points with something better than a bedroom rehearsal sound. We have some sloppy galloping here too, but as with Hellgoat they’re kept to a minimum and maybe, if we could hear the guitars, they could be not terribly bothering. Like with the other band in the split, I find the vocals the best element in the mix, as the drums do what they’re supposed to do in a good black metal band, that is blasting. Can’t say much more as it’s quite difficult to hear what they are pretending to be playing here.

And that’s it, I don’t have much more to add, as it is it sounds like some ordinary bestial death/black metal band. I guess Astaroth didn’t inspire very much the band.

HELLGOAT (USA): “Moonlight Ritual” split Cd-r with LEGIONS OF ASTAROTH 2005 Vile Art

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If I was a stalwart defender of high-fidelity sound I could have never enjoyed bands like Apator or Black Mass Of Absu, yet we’re at a severely dangerous level here in terms of shitty sound. Luckily enough Hellgoat does not use the oxidized camera mic as a trick to recreate dismal landscape of shit like early Burzum. I will proceed in reviewing this split demo with a good share of my cognitive capacity focused on the health of my speakers, though, as they have been crackling and popping dangerously since the very first second. Whet we have is is rather plain, almost indistinguishable Black Metal with decent vocals. The cover of this slimcase is just a color-xeroxed piece of paper with song titles written by hand, but you know, I generally like disadvantaged people. The music is as repetitive and uninspiring as you can imagine, but I find some interesting ideas, if only I could discern a little bit more on what’s going on. Might be a good stuff for lovers of the aforementioned bands, or Gonkulator, as it’s not funeral shit Black Metal but something closer to Death/Black is labels still do matter something today. What I mean is there is some structure here, some fairly evocative riffing, flesh ripping vocals and so on. They sometime fall into the mid-tempo danger zone (and I HATE the mid tempo gallop) but it’s not something hugely intrusive. I guess it’s one of those cases a little fuller production could have mattered (or a slightly more basic songwriting if we want to keep it minimalist and indulge on the cave sound).

IMPRECATION (USA): “Sigil Of Baphomet” Ep 7″ 1993 Drowned

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Let’s open the weekly “flashback” review with one of my favorite Eps. I have heard often the name of Imprecation of late and every time I hear it this 7″ immediately comes to mind. Well there are several things that make this one of my favorite records, first and foremost the concept, Black Metal. When I speak of Black Metal i don’t speak about granny vocals and buzzing guitars, I speak of Black Metal as a conceptual thing, much like what the call today “the first wave” when being a Black Metal had nothing to do with the sound. Imprecation had its roots profoundly dug into the occult, with added elements of Lovecraftian horror in the best early Morbid Angel way, plus an added touch of gore, which is just something I am obsessed with and always live in an extreme metal band.

“Sigil Of Baphomet” is a Drowned Records release, and we basically all know how Drowned was possibly one of the best labels around before 1993 in terms of both sound and aesthetics. How all this was progressively lost with Repulse and totally canceled in Xtreem is still a matter of speculation, but for sure Drowned is in my top 10 personal best labels of all time, from the earlier compilation tapes (might be reviewing them one day) up to records like Purtenance, Demigod or Rottrevore. Everything in this label reeked of decrepit Death Metal and old books, and even the artwork was always in line with the concept that some labels try to recapture today (hey, I am not blaming anybody here, I am one of those eheh!).

In particular this 7″ had this deep red and black print which was an exact expression of the sound, claustrophobic and eerie at the same time. It came with an insert too, with lyrics, band pics and the so incredibly useful thank list that was our main source of information on the new bands to check out.

I personally find this Ep also has the best tracks that this band ever recorded, way darker and heavier and suffocating than the demo they recorded right before, and the newer tracks they recorded in 1994 found in the later classic Repulse compilation “Theurgia Goetia Summa”. The sound here is absolutely nothing short of frightening, a real trip to an hell of dismembered limbs and rivers of gore regurgitated by an horde of cloven-hooved demons. Try to follow the unrelenting slow crunch of the songs reading the lyrics and you find yourself entangled in a dimension of blood red horror. Incantation Eps or “Onward To Golgotha” days are definitely the first albums you can relate this record to, but there is something that keeps it on a different track. I find Imprecation a little bit more brutal, and straight in your face in their approach compared to early Incantation (which, honestly, remain unparalleled in style). i personally like this garage, muffled sound because it really brings me to a dungeon where corpses are hung to hooks ready for being sacrificed to some dark entity. Not a lot more to say, this is an all time classic in my favorite format that is 7″ vinyl, so I know this would be one of the ones I will keep if I had to choose among the best in my collection.

SEEKING OBSCURE (USA): “Seeking Obscure” full-length Cd 2007 Metalbolic

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Please give me some minutes to recover from the extreme pain of watching this thing, because this is possibly the worse album I have seen in SEVERAL years. As for the music, hey I will not start spoling the fun here. Let’s just stick on the horrendous layout for a few seconds. First and foremost, the logo is only mediocre but succeeds in looking even worse with an effect of INNER shading, a shade that goes from GREEN to ORANGE. Did I forget to premise that this album is supposed to be a Death Metal album? After the summer ice cream poster color scheme, my eyes move on to the cover where an appalling work of computer tricks awkwardly glue together, in order: a pair of forearms with the logo (thus repeated twice) tattooed on, two tiny pixie feti, an upside down cadaver with crotch hair on the head and a sunset over a red sea plus random stitches, eyes and corpses. Now this is really something that could compete to the first pressing of Broken Hope’s “Swamped in Gore” (the almighty cover with the chessboard).

The greatest part of this layout however lies not on cover, nor on the multi-colored and multi-font inner spread with its amazing arrangement of graphic files with different hues of black and randomly placed corpses, but… the tray! I can’t describe this thing clearly enough, you have to see this thing: I haven’t mentioned it before, but this is a ONE MAN BAND. Just to make it clear that our Napoleon Dynamite rocker-edition is playing everything he took care to have pictures of himself playing all the instruments, subsequently arranging the photos close to the logos of the companies like he is getting an endorsement from Yamaha or Ibanez! Please note he has gloves when playing drums and a cap while playing guitar. Oh, what an clever trickster he is, what a sly deceiver!

Please have a look at the fonts and the color of the spines! PURE DEATH METAL!

Having reached this point, NOT skipping Einstein quotes and statements of intent on how this one man band from Wyoming is going to contribute to the glorious history of Death Metal, I am now braced to hear it.

It starts out with George Carlin making clever statements on how ridiculous religion is. Not my idea on how to start a Death Metal album but let’s go on! Rob/Dynamite actually smashes all by playing his own kind of death metal in the same genuine vein of the Italian Metal college bands I heard when I was a teenager, with mid-atrocious tarantella tempos going on forever and flat vocals that just follow the same pace of the aimless (but technical!) chugging over and over. Not happy with this slab of sloppiness however, Rob/Dynamite is daring enough to make it even worse with some spine-chilling accelerations, merry epic metal melodies, keyboard sweeps, phone call samples and much more. I am impressed since all that should NOT be in a good Death Metal album is neatly arranged here for convenience save, apparently, for the drum machine,  (Rob takes pride in playing a real set!). The funny stuff is that this album even has a BARCODE and a punch-hole, just in case I was lucky enough to get some retard buy this thing for 1 euro you know. Man I haven’t finished to hear it once and I am already freaking out. Is there no end to the pain? He continuously manage to place arpeggios, epic guitar shreds with lyrics that could compete with Metallica’s incredibly aggressive radio track “Escape” and to top it off – a fucking KISS cover! This is a real masterpiece of not-awesomeness, goes straight between my demo tapes of Mototronko and Die!

Buy or die, highly recommended!!!

PULVERIZING LETHAL FORCE (USA): “Crushing Fury of Bastardization” full-length Cd 2008 Power It Up

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Pulverizing Lethal Force aka Pretty Little Flower(s) is yet another metallic grind core band from USA. I already plentifully stressed out that I prefer a crustier kind of grind, yet I cannot deny the catchiness of the songs nor the unquestionable ability of this band to concoct enjoyable music. There is so much metal in both sound and structure in this Cd, that sometimes they even remind me of very early Sinister, but there is also a constant use of blastbeats and groove which is typical of the “punkier” part of the spectrum – I could say this band is 60% and 60% if you know what I mean.

The booklet is plain yet rather well done with 8 pages and some lyrics printed inside, of the classic yet never old “socioapocalyptic” kind, all about fury and crushing rage, everything packed in a sober, rational style.

I am not hugely fond of live shows (except for blatantly good ones, like Last Days of Humanity‘s amazing Cd of some years ago) so the final tracks can be easily skipped, but the tracks 1 to 17 are intense and tight enough to make up for a good album all the same, and they even squeezed covers by Doom, Unseen Terror and Denak inside this record. This might be one of the best releases I have heard from Power It Up so far, strictly speaking about this specific kind of furious metallic grind. There is a lot of groove and energy displayed all through, without all the dissonant bridge bollocks we often hear today. PLF is a band that is able to play its cards without recurring to any bells and whistles or endless intros as they can produce good riffs, arrange them with taste and record them with a extra generous pinch of ferocity. Well done, not bad at all.