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Chainsaw Dissection > Eviscerated by a Ravenous Cannibal > Reviews > Noktorn
Chainsaw Dissection - Eviscerated by a Ravenous Cannibal

Completely insane - 80%

Noktorn, June 30th, 2011

You know the story. Chainsaw Dissection: primary project of one Bob Macabre, a dude with an unhealthy obsession with horror movies and deathgrind, who has numerous other projects with rather similar sounds to this one which have collectively released more music than the entire discography of the rest of the world combined. A lot of people immediately dismiss projects like these- underground, primitive, somewhat amateurish takes on extreme styles that are more focused on simple creation than quality control- but I think there's something definitely relevant to artists like Chainsaw Dissection and the other projects of Bob Macabre. It helps that Chainsaw Dissection is one of the more clearly virulent, extreme, and terrifying projects in this particular subsection of extreme music, and "Eviscerated by a Ravenous Cannibal" is certainly one of the better releases of his I've heard.

Derived from equal parts Mortician and late Last Days of Humanity, "Eviscerated by a Ravenous Cannibal" is defined by ultra-fast tempos, basically indecipherable, noisy riffing, and a ranting, depraved vocal performance than sounds as insane as anything Nattramn has managed to scream. The tracks on this album are simple, direct, short bursts of frenzied extremity: an unbelievably fast drum machine is set to blast 99% of the time, and the riffs are are so insanely distorted that finding a hint of melody is essentially impossible. Apart from occasional random fills or sudden, lurchingly slow passages in the Mortician vein, this is binary music: it's on or it's off. The drum machine blasts, the guitars grind and rip over it, and the vocals half-shout, half-growl with a nearly equal level of distortion to the guitars, monotonously hateful, basically arrhythmic, very possibly improvised, and clearly present to add another layer of chaos to the already violent, churning music of the instrumental section. In short, it's not for the average metalhead.

There's something more important to this style than the music itself, though, which is a sort of combined meta-effect from listening to the album as a whole. The songs on this album have sharp, ragged edges- when a tempo change occurs, it snaps into place without any sort of preparatory fill or crescendo, and beginnings and endings are almost completely arbitrary. It's punishingly extreme music designed to perfectly represent its subject matter: mass murder, cannibalism, rape, and insanity. None of the tracks are memorable on their own, but the particular style and delivery of the brutality inherent to them absolutely is; you get a certain sense of frenzied, chaotic terror from this music that's absent from much of metal, and that alone makes this designed more for a gorenoise and experimental crowd than a metal one.

Is this a good metal album? Probably not. Is this a good album in the overarching umbrella term of "extreme music"? Almost certainly. This is not designed for anyone but the most extreme and depraved out there, but I personally find myself much more entranced by it than I'm comfortable with. Recommended.