Boy howdy, what fun it is when you find something that reeks of a gory bloodbath taking place in the kitchen! Just the album cover to Cartilage’s 12-minute offering Gore-Met was about enough to sell me, and the music sounds exactly what you’d picture. Grindcore riffs with blistering, incomprehensible vocals, all themed around body-horror in the kitchen is what we’re in for. Get your apron and chef hat ready, this is a wild ride!
“Enough To Make Your Skin Crawl” starts us off on the most conventional note, based around a failed experiment making beings become mutant and disgusting. The actual music is pretty death metal oriented, but the double-tracked vocals and smashing speeds are loads of fun. Helps it fit the overall idea as well. “Deranged Delikatessen” rails on with a bit more abrasion, tossing around guts and gore with slam-like rhythms and sharp blasts from the drumming.
Following this is “I’m A Doner,” the sharpest tune here that loads itself with the harshest vocals yet. Weirdly enough, it has the tightest rhythms to go with, and I do find the drums to stand out pretty nicely here as well. Closing us off is a cover of Celtic Frost’s “Into The Crypts Of Rays,” grasping the first-wave black metal banger and turning it into something far more chaotic than Tom G. Warrior ever really intended.
Ultimately Gore-Met achieves what it sets out to do very well. It’s clearly going to be a bit one-sided as you can’t do too much more with these ingredients (pun intended). Throwing that cover at the end was also an odd choice, but they did a pretty good job of making it work without being an outlier. What can I say? Nothing amazing, but for those looking for a grimy serving of boiling flesh, you should have no issues finding it here.
Originally written for Sleeping Village