Oggi il Dottor Marciume ascolta: Hostis Humani Generis “Asphyxiation In Blood” tape, Death Metal from Finland, 2017 Unholy Domain
I had to listen to this tape over and over before assembling a reasonable string of thoughts into a review, and that’s because while the band is so primitive in songwriting every member is a 20+ year veteran on the scene and I had to clearly envision why they decided to go this minimal. Many things on this recording work. For a start, the recording has a weird ambience, typical of earlier finnish recordings of bands like Belial or Unholy (quite different stuff, but just to give an idea), that music that was not yet defined as either Black or Death or whatever, just grim and painful. One riff: much feel. And the vocals are amazing too, hellish and evil. Yet while I think I got their point I am not able to get too hooked, I love this stuff in general but when things get this simplified I believe one riff, just one great riff is enough to change the game, but then I cannot hear a single great riff in there. Huge potential and yet hitherto unexplored.
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).
Ah ah ah! Great!! This is the fucking stuff I love to hear. Chainsaw slashing through bone, sinew and muscle, and blood spurting everywhere. Screams of agony and fear as the carnage grows. An incomprehensible logo, a face completely ripped off in a pool of blood on the cover, splattered entrails all through the booklet and meter-long song titles about horrible pathological monstrosities. This Cd has it all even before putting the Cd up. Complete with that respectable no-nonsense of gore-grind played below the longitude of the United States. Fuck humor, this is the real grind, faggots.
Once the Cd is on ans spinning however… things are definitely as good as expected! Contrarily to what happened before with other bands like Flesh Grinder, this is not a band that will delude you. This stuff really rocks: super-raw sound, complete with ultra crackling bass and gurgling gore vocals, sewage guitar distortion and fast blasting drum smashing. I definitely reccomend Hipermenorrea to all lovers of real goregrind, especially the ones that, like me, got tired of the comic book humor of Razorback bands, the nice and ordered grind of Swedish bands like Regurgitate and -horror – the fun loving approach of western European bands (bleah) or this disco music grind made in Germany. Mexico is still the shit to go if you look after the real spirit of GORE. These incomprehensible blood gargling vocals only deal with the most insane and deranged pathosplatter topics. Lovable. One might be tempted to do a comparison with early Disgorge… well on such a statement I would not agree… Disgorge was objectively much, much more complicated, original and suffocating, but anyway this band remains a good choice of pure goregrind, with even a good amount of sludginess now and then, among the grinding blasts. The abundant use of screams, bubbling and fermenting sounds between songs add sickness to the package. Total respect.
One thing I definitely have to admit I don’t like in this release is the booklet layout however, even though there is a good choice of splatter pictures. The arrangement of elements, the choice of fonts and the whole layout is as bad as early Garden of Grief or Last Episode releases. Seems like a kid placed this booklet together. This is the only thing that takes this Cd one little point below 9. Real great stuff. Buy or die.
This is the first time I hear Hacksaw Surgery, and even though they are sharing ground with such a mild offering as Embalming Theatre, I still remain pretty much unfeeling all through the five tracks. The singer’s style has some light year distant resemblance to the Corpsegrinder, but the music bulk is just some disturbingly average drum machine thing with touches of grind and routine bedroom cybergrind. I am not sure how to describe this, but might be a collection of riffs discarded from Gigantic Brain minus all the speed and freakiness of that otherwise funny project.
I have no clue how much did it take to write these 4-5 tracks, but that mustn’t have been a difficult task. 6 scarce minutes of absolutely useless music. How could one sign a band like this is beyond me.
