This album by Englishmen Desecration has the big flaw of starting out with a few seconds of bare drum beats without any backing string instruments. I consider this a flaw becouse the sound of the drums on this album is really atrocious, worthy of the worse Vomit Remnants or Infected Malignity. That said, one has to clarify that the music itself is oddly totally different from what one could expect from the drum sound, as we don’t have routine “cold” star and stripes Brutal Death Metal like the Japanese do. Desecration play a good mxcture of Death and a touch of Grind with raw guitar sound and growling vocals. Ollie’s vocals are excellent and possibly the best thing in the album : ogre-deep at times, at others phlegmy and disgusting or even piglike. The riffs themselves are not always top notch, the mid tempo power chords placed at regular intervals in every song are a bit too “aggro” “Machine Head” for my delicate tastes, but in general I have managed to appreciate the album from start to finish – there is also a good share of relentless accelerations and incomprehensible grunts which generally raise the heaviness of the work. I don’t remember much of the previous albums but I remember I liked the 7″ quite a bit – I cannot really trace any parallel right now. All I want to stress is that I would really appreciate if they cut away all this terrible stop and go palm muting stuff, it’s really unnecessary.
The idea of writing an album on the concept of a decomposing body reminds me of The Todeskings (the cult Buttgereit movie dedicated to Death and decomposition), and reading the singer Ollie has some professional first hand experience on the file of dead bodies, I assume the lyrics could have been an interesting read. We don’t often read true English people writing lyrics. Pity.
The cover art and layout are also quite appalling, garish and plain, with wrongly placed graphic elemnts, terrible cheap photoshop effects, and grossly depixelated pictures. Epitomite should consider changing graphic artist.
It is fun to read how prolific and compact the scene from Sardinia is. I was first introduced to Sardinian grind with my long time friend Wally ‘s band Ass Ache still in the 80’s (!!) and then with a bunch of other bands which appeared in the “Ugo Story” compilation tapes. Let’s tell it straight: this Cd is just made up of 5 minutes of real music plus a bulk of intros and a very long (and a bit sleepy) concatenation of electronic loops. But those 5 minutes of real shit are intense enough to raise a brow. Very few, extremely basic crusty riffs with a bit of Agathocles feeling, coupled with unintelligible liquid vocals in pure gore-grind style. I especially like the metallic sound of the bass distortion. In short this is genuine dirty to the point goregrind with some courageous experimentations in the electronic field. I just wonder why they’re still promoting 5 scarce minutes of material which were recorded 5 years ago (!!) and released only 2 years later. Songs like these are generally mass produced by the dozens – one riff, one song. The cover art is okay too, even if it spots a photo which was already used on Meat Shits‘ “Sniper at the Fag Parade”. Not a mandatory “demo” but fun.
I was complaining right the other day about the seemigly complete lack of serious goregrind bands with a real fucking line up and not just drum machine and computer bases. Luckily Grindhead from Australia has come in aid, as this Devoured Flesh Regurgitation album is just that, a real grindgore record with real musician, that took over 4 years in the making. It just feels reassuring that it was ot made overnight like so many releases today.
I actually hate the shouted punk vocals on this album, a la “old English way of early grindcore”, not becouse they’re not deep or whatever, but they just sound a bit fake in the mix – so to say out of place. Seems like someone just took an album that was already complete and mixed, and added some barking with a walkman. In other words I really believe they’re totally superfluous, get rid of that shit. BUT! This band has a double vocal approach (just like old ENT) and the second one is our beloved more reassuring, traditional octaved gargle of early RGTE and old Malignant Tumour. Soundwise the inspirations are many, from crust to more traditional grindcore with a lot of blasts and the classick touch of punk induced groove plus a bit of the blur of early noise bands like Sore Throat. I really like it when all the instruments converge to a point where all the fury is unleashed in a wall of sound crowned with froglike croaks. Luckily we have something sick to listen to this time and age. There is not that excess of R’n’R groove that is abounding too much lately into grid in my opinion, and that’s another good point. We’re a bit far from the impossible damp heaviness of Last Days of Humanity and early Squash Bowels, but we’reon the right way. To get and support! The band split up in 2006, too bad!
Neat work with the packaging this time, the label is improving release after release. I would have skipped the embossing on the fonts, tho.
PS: Actually the vocals were really recorded later than the instruments.
This 2 track demo Cd-r by the band Dying from Spain made me recognize one thing: solos are back in Death Metal. Like it or not, after an almost 10-year gap they’re finally back. Sure we had some Nile, Angelcorpse or Krisiun but here we’re talking about classic, unripe solos popping into demo tracks, not seasoned professionals strutting their stuff. They are again part of the genre since the beginning.
Talking about music, this is not exactly my kind of Death Metal (it’s the brutal-and-technical American style Death Metal with guttural vocals and chugs kind) but it’s not a totally slapdash attempt at playing Brutal Death stuff either. The recipe is the same used for a lot of other newer bands: lots of heavy NY slam with beefy riffs, growling vocals plus a daring dose of slightly wrecked solos – yet the elements are arranged and put together with some wisdom. The vocals are quite deep, the drumming technical and precise and there is not a tarantella I could detect in the mix which is a difficult thing to avoid today. I cannot think of precise comparisons at the moment, maybe some Deeds of Flesh or Dislimb when it gets faster but the slower parts are closer to classic NY sound a la Internal Bleeding.I admit I found several nice parts in the sound, especially when the music gets sluggish and grinding. Nothing incredible but neither entirely average, surely worth checking out.
It’s a bit surprising to realize that the cover used in this demo is professionally printed, as this work is well beyond all parameters of typography, all the images are very jagged. Tsk. But in the end it’s just a demo so what the fuck. No lyrics included, as it’s typical these days.
