Santo subito

The most straightforward bunch from the Austrian Triumvirate (which also consists of Pungent Stench, famous for their self-nibbling satire, and Dali-esque Disharmonic Orchestra) is not amongst the most prolific - it's their fifth album in 30 years. The genre-loyal brutality is fairly represented in classy artwork - rotten post-autopsy two-faced corpse and a dimly lit flesh-coloured background. Sure, it is capable to bring back an unwilling tear from an old school boys, but the package is not the feast - the course itself is what matters the most. And it must align with the cover.

Overall album sound was notably digitalized and earned some effectively sounding dynamic range, but it feels less explosive and raw in comparison to albums from 90s. But it's still not too polished. Vocal performance is rather angry and spiteful but it does not match the universe-crusher bulldozer growls of Harald Bezdek. You won't find a lot of vocal variety - if there's any, it's mostly a thin layer of sound effects. Riffs are mostly simple and somehow predictable - you cannot spot Elmar Warmuth going off the higher part of the neck. Quasi-melodic solos, for which the band is somehow famous, seem a bit rudimentary or not really necessary at times. Manfred Perack, now the only original band member, offered a quirky solutions to the rhythmic gaps in those songs, you can say that the most attractive part of the album is his drum playing. The proper analogy for the music Disastrous Murmur had offered here is a domesticated wolf - if the owner can find a way to reach the animan and the wolf's in a playful mood, you can imitate some of its wild antics, but sometimes you can make it enjoy common, silly dog toys (with which I compare the small solos spangled across the length of this LP). When you keep listening to this album, you don't get a feeling of abhorrent repetitiveness. even though an old school band releasing a very old school inspired album could've inevitably if not swept under the rug, then just had to additionally kill the listener's boredom. Speaking about the album highlights, I would mark a German-language, catchy, morbid track "Menschenfresser", kick-starting muscular boost o "Stop Talking - Start Dying" and pretty fun song called "Partially Executed Self-Cannibalism".

So, if being brutally honest and unbiased, this album is not the one to lead the charts of the genre - a great reputation and age did a lot for its notability. But if you think about it, for a moderately famous band with a banner waving up from good old times and a very loyal European fan base, this one is a good job. The band plays gigs and records songs mostly for pleasure on their own pace, being the rest mode they arguably deserved. they don't get ahead of themselves at all. And they know what people expect and especially what people want from them. This 66 rating is fine and fair, considering that if you liked previous Disastrous Murmur albums before, you'll hardly find a reason to hate this one.

Originally written for: https://www.darkside.ru/album/55598/

Thumbs up for longevity here, although from a productivity point-of-view this batch doesn’t deserve that many accolades, popping up fairly irregularly on the metal map, reminding of themselves in a variety of ways, but not really willing to strain themselves and become a firm unquestionable presence on it. But that’s alright, sometimes an ephemeral murmur is all it takes to conflagrate a setting and turn it into a red-hot mayhem…

and things were going in that exact direction once the excellent debut was unleashed upon the fanbase in the distant 1992, a brutal yet contrived slab of old school death metal which needed very little to capture the unrefined but ear-grabbing riff-entanglements from the early Suffocation exploits. And things were definitely going in that exact direction if the guys hadn’t faltered on “Folter” two years later, a not very focused second instalment where the tight violent pummeling from the first coming was dispersed among bouts of frivolous near-catchy punky/core rhythms and miscalculated acoustic/balladic segments, the band trying to create a blend, intentionally to these ears, between the other two death metal behemoths on Austrian soil, the more jocund non-fussy Pungent Stench and the ambitious more thought-out Disharmonic Orchestra.

An attempt that ultimately failed as said mixture sounded too strained and artificial, the album completely lacking the spontaneity and the gusto of its predecessor. The resultant amalgam stayed around for “… and Hungry Are the Lost” seven years later, presented in a slightly loftier more aggressive manner, but hit the bottom again on “Marinate Your Meat”, another very dubious death/core/punk conglomerate. Under the circumstances, the expectations for the album reviewed here weren’t big at all, the Spanish title turning the trepidations into serious earthshaking tremors.

Well, it’s never too late to debunk all anti-myths, and this is exactly what occurs here, the band, largely the drummer Manfred Perack, the founder and the only permanent member; and Elmar Warmuth, the guitarist and vocalist who joined in 1998, rushing on all fours, producing their finest outing since the “Rhapsody…”. “So, no punk, no core… no shit?” Well, not in such annoyingly copious amounts as before, the guys venting out quite a bit of aggression with a sequence of short bursting, vintage retro death metal cuts (“Extraterrestial Blowjob Luziferism”, “Stop Talking -Start Dying”), also winning a couple of points from the highly-imaginative song-title department. The core segments (“Faith, Fist, Fire”) are more nonchalantly served, cancelled outright by the more serious near-progressive achievements (“Barbecue... and Me”), the obligatory joke song (“The Evil One”) a noisy industrial outtake. The thing is that such distractions aren’t many at all, the band keeping the mosh going all around, sometimes with a catchier melodic sting (“Partially Executed Self-Cannibalism”), sometimes with two eyes on the technical (the excellent shredder “666 Modified Microwave Possession”), the title-track a diverse roller-coaster with myriad moods and rhythms rushing in quick succession.

A nice crystal-clear sound quality is by all means a plus, facilitating the musicians’ efforts, Warmuth’s intimidating but authoritative deathly shouts always comprehensible and articulate, the band exuding confidence and sincerity, having no intentions whatsoever in re-inventing the wheel or in carving another niche on the contemporary metal horizon. There are no surprises in stall, and this should be the more viable alternative in this case, the Austrian veterans simply having no right to further blemish their career, also having in mind how infrequent their descents are. The classic death metal roster by all means needs the old dogs to keep the audience on their toes, showing the young upstarts the way, averting disasters, and possibly cooking another burning rhapsody as a tasty filling main course.