Hacked Up for Barbecue

I remember when I first started listening to Mortician...a friend of mine and I hung out and we both went to the mall, where we proceeded to stride into F.Y.E. and he found the band's "House by the Cemetery" compilation (which featured that EP as well as some early demos and other rare goodies!!) and let me listen to it. My initial reaction was "why the fuck are all the samples so long?", but eventually I ended up getting this CD (my mom bought it for me for Christmas!) and soon became a Mortician enthusiast despite not really knowing much else from this ultra-brutal genre of death metal.

Is this brutal death metal? Is this grind core? Is this gore death grind? Well, I don't really know or care. Personally I'd rather just say the band plays "death metal" and be done with it...why have all these silly labels that are only counter-productive to the overall development of the genre? What you can expect to find on Mortician's "Hacked Up for Barbeque" is in essence a pretty decent slab of what you could find on any death / grind CD...ultra deep growls, brutal riffs, and gore-soaked lyrics...Mortician have it all! However, many of the tracks on this album feature lengthy, often disturbing horror movie samples which usually reflect the song's meaning (for instance, "Mortician" features a "Phantasm" sample and has lyrics that reference "Phantasm" rather blatantly), but also can be boring and pointless. The title track, "Hacked Up for Barbeque", reflects this perfectly as it features a two-minute sample from the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's climax (where the girl gets chased around by Leatherface and then gets put on meathook while forced to watch her boyfriend be dismembered...blah blah blah), and while that's a cool scene and all, it doesn't really make any sense for it to be a sample...but then again who am I to judge? As long as the band brings the goods eventually...sigh...I guess I can wait. And besides, some of these samples are damn cool too, such as in "Mortician" which features the line from Phantasm, or "Cannibal Feast", "Apocalyptic Devastation", and "Witches Coven" even features the infamous theme song from "Suspiria", so thus counts as a genius sample as well.

The music itself has a very minimalistic approach to song-writing, with songs often featuring only 2-3 riffs which take after the likes of Celtic Frost, Morbid Angel, and Obituary. While simple, the riffs are catchy, songs like "Inquisition", "Decapitated", "Hacked Up for Barbeque", and "Cremated" will have you air-drumming, head banging, playing air guitar, etc. all at the same time. Other songs show off a slower, doomier sound similar to what Bolt Thrower and Incantation were doing at the time, most notably the brooding insanity of "Fog of Death". Guitar leads are rare, but nonetheless, you can hear them in tracks like "Abolition" (over a thick, Bolt Thrower-esque groove), and in "Embalmed Alive". The vocals are deep, guttural moans which never change in pitch, nor their inhumanity. Other vocalists like Craig Pillard, Chris Barnes, etc. all added little hints of their humanity into their vocals...but Will Rahmer does not do anything like that. His vocals remain guttural, inhuman, and utterly demonic for the entire album's length, which is a true feat considering these styles of growls are extremely hard to emulate.

It's too bad that Mortician is so overlooked in the heavy metal community, as they certainly have a lot to offer in the way of pure, unadulterated fun. Is this art? Fuck no. But is this fun and extremely soul-shatteringly heavy? You bet your sweet, candy-apple ass it is!! I don't listen to this CD all the time, but when I'm in the mood for something that is brutal, fun, and overall extremely entertaining and loveable, this is the ideal CD to play. I'll take off some points because I thought that the samples should have been shortened up just a tad in some places, but when it comes to brutal death/grindcore, this album really hits the mark as one of the heaviest and most consistently entertaining albums I have ever heard. Hopefully you'll love it as much as I did!!