| Reviews for Nuclear Death (US)'s Welcome to the Minds of the Morbid |
| The early stages of chaos - 88% |
| Written by Drowned
on December 16th, 2005
|
| Nuclear Death's second demo tape is an aggressive dose of chaotic death/thrash bordering on grindcore. To anyone not familiar with this band, it featured the vocal talents of Lori Bravo, who was one of the first women to attempt harsh vocals in an extreme metal band. The tape consists of five short compositions that will send your mind through a warzone, until chewing it up and then spitting it out in the middle of the Arizona desert. The production here is mimimal. The vocals are high in the mix, while the bass drum is very hard to make out. The guitars have a dirty thrash sound to them similar to early Sadistik Exekution and also to some of the old bands on the Cogumelo record label. The drumming is equally as primitive. It sounds like the drummer is using grindcore blasts half the time, but in reality it's just very sloppy fast-tempo thrash beats. Lori's vocals are much different from her work on the later Nuclear Death material. Here, she was using more of a clean, aggressive thrash scream that sometimes borders on falsetto. It's really fucked up! No cheesy intros here. The demo opens at full force right off the bat as "Necrobestiality" attacks the listener with all its fury. The song slows down towards the end, where some tamer Slayer-like riffs emerge into the mix. "Cremation" is next, and it begins with a crazy, pounding drum beat that later evolves into some faint double bass kicking. The faster riffs wind their way into the song, as the atmosphere gets darker and darker. Here's where the Sadistik Exekution vibe really sets in. This particular track reminds me a lot of "Lupercalia" and other such crazyness from their "Magus" debut recorded only a year prior to this tape. "The Third Antichrist" is probably the best song the demo. It provides a good range of slow, chunky sections and hyper-fast ones. Lori's vocals really start to sound weird here, as she goes into falsetto-like singing during the chorus. It's amusing to listen to, and at the end of the song her vocals sound very winded because of it. "On Behalf of the Beast" is a brief instrumental track, but it's not an orgy of silly acoustics and keyboards mind you! Rather, it's filled to the brim with some killer Possessed-like leads that will make you want to headbang until the sun is down. The tape ends with the bonus track "A Dark Country", which gets extremely chaotic about midway through. The bass guitar sounds very heavy during the slower sections, and this is one of the only instances on the demo where it's easy to hear... Lori's voice goes even deeper into weirdness here as she unleashes an eerie, robotic-like growl with the help of a delay processor. "Welcome to the Minds of the Morbid" is a good example of the chaos that Nuclear Death were already creating in the 80's; and while it's not as good as their third demo tape, this one needs to be heard for the amusing vocals alone. |