Swallow Swouming Mass

I must have mentioned it already several times, but I am big fan of the Dutch death metal scene. Back in the early 90's they had some of the best bands in Europe. Whether we speak of albums from more mainstream and well-known names like Pestilence, Asphyx and Gorefest or these more obscure records from bands like God Dethroned (with their cult debut LP!), Eternal Solstice, Burial, Altar and Acrostichon... or bands, which only did some demos like Korsakov or Excavation - they were all fuckin killer. Dissect should also be mentioned here. They were a great, but very short-lived band, with just a couple of demos and one full length album in their discography. They didn't play anything exceptional, but it was solid death metal, which nowadays still sounds worthy and great.

I honestly have not been able to listen to their classic album "Swallow Swouming Mass" for many years. I used to have it on cassette, but I lost it somewhere ages ago. Sadly, it's one of those releases whose original CD is not only quite difficult to find, but it's also insanely expensive. So, a re-issue was much welcome and it came from Xtreem Music in 2013. The CD version contains not only the album, but also “Presage to the Eternity” (Demo '92) and “Growls of Death” (Demo '91), which is damn cool option. But I had to grab a vinyl copy, this was the best way to listen to this classic death metal release. Sadly, the LP is derived of all the goods which the CD has - no extended booklet, no demo songs... but I do hope that Xtreem Music will put out a separate vinyl release with these two demos also. That would be pretty cool, I think. In the meantime, it's time to swallow some disgusting putrid stuff from the full length, which the band released in 1993.

"Swallow Swouming Mass" is an album that you have to grab, because it's a great and very solid brutal piece of death metal that needs no recommendation! This is an excellent record. Stylistically you would imagine they're rather from Finland not Holland, because the music is closer to such Demilich or Disgrace, rather than to Pestilence. I'm simplifying things, of course. It's truly dark and brutal sounding stuff, where the harsh riffs are violent and savage, growls are vicious and truly fuckin sick and beastly... And the music has good balance between all kind of tempos, fast and even doomy slow, where the heaviness will crush your bones with a lethal pleasure. I suppose you can also compare it to Gorefest's "Mindloss" or Acrostichon in some ways... but who cares, really. The thing is, this is truly killer album and some of these songs are damn sick! With such songs like "Exterion Tumours" it's a real crusher. Of course, Dissect didn't have the quality and great power of bands like Sinister or Pestilence. All in all, they were more underground and when compared to them, "Swallow Swouming Mass" sounds almost primitive and neanderthal, if you know what I mean. It's way more savage and putrid death metal, very obscure, underground release. "Swallow Swouming Mass" is not an album filled with effective fireworks and impressive production value. It's exactly the opposite, with very messy playing and primitive character. But it is a good album, it has its charm and there's something about such albums that makes me like and enjoy them a lot (and I do recommend reading the lyrics! They're so bad haha... really hilarious texts).

The new edition of "Swallow Swouming Mass" has a different front artwork. Usually I don't like when the reissue comes with changed cover, I prefer to see the original. But sometimes I can live with it, if the new artwork is cool and fits the idea of the first press (vide Centinex' "Subconscious Lobotomy" vinyl, Depravity's "Silence of the Centuries" LP or Funebre's "Children of the Scorn" LP/CD). This new art on "Swallow Swouming Mass" reissue is really good, better than the original one (which you can still see in big format on the back of the vinyl cover), so there's no problem with it. All in all, Xtreem Music did great job with this reissue, I do recommend this sick album!

Standout tracks: "Exterion Tumours", "Z-Day", "Pulsating Blood"
Final rate: 75/100

I've stated time and time again that one of my absolute favorite niche movements in metal history was the early death metal of the 1990s, at the time when the genre was just starting to figure out its identity and as such was still a primordial soup of thrash metal mixed in with what we would later learn to know as death metal. Dissect comes from the tail end of that time period, so their sole album, Swallow Swouming Mass, seems to be one of the ones that got their shit together and solidified the twisted ideals of Morbid Angel and Entombed into a solid, slimy, brutal death metal release.

Despite early OSDM being among my favorite niches, I never write about it, and that's because it's frankly really hard to write about. You know what it's gonna be, and the fact that the quality of damn near every single release you can dredge up, from the high profile acts of Florida, New York, and Stockholm, to the underground gems that didn't fully get the praise they deserved until long after their time as a band (like Demented Ted, Wombbath, and others) was so consistently high, there's really only so much you can say about them all. This is what makes Dissect such a difficult target for me, I can tell you that the vocals are among the top echelon of their peers, with a deep, punishing growl on par with Ross Dolan, but that's really the only thing that stands out in any way. That's not a knock against anything else present on the album, the rest of it is astoundingly well written and performed (other than maybe the lyrics being a bit silly at times, but even then I always appreciate a bit of levity), it just falls in line with what almost every other band in the genre was doing at the time, which is totally fine by me. This comes from a time before blastbeats were the go-to crutch for every song, instead relying on those fast thrash beats that Kreator and Slayer helped pioneer, tastefully interspersed with flashes of Morbid Angel and Suffocation here and there, and it helps keep the songs varied throughout their runtimes. The skill in the percussion comes less from inhuman endurance and more from creative songwriting, and it's a lesson that many modern drummers need to take note of.

Like Demilich, Funebre, Rottrevore, and apparently 80% of all other bands around this time, the band only managed to crank out one album before packing it in, and it's a shame, because I'd like to see how this would have developed. The riffs are all very morbidly twisted and the vocals are guttural and hellish, the drumming is creative and the songs all mesh together to creative a craggly hellscape that I can't help but enjoy romping through. It's hard to really go on at length about what this album offers because it's so cohesive and rides on a solid plateau of quality throughout the runtime (which is entirely the reason I rarely review early death metal by the way), so I find myself throwing vague superlatives out there without much else behind them. I'm sorry kids, but that's really all I can do. This is dark, engulfing, mid paced OSDM with that trademark Scandinavian flavor that makes it just a little bit slimier and more disgusting, and apart from the quick bass run in "Growls of Death", there isn't much to single out. It's a great experience from beginning to end, and it's just another jewel in the veritable pirate chest that was death metal from 1990-95.

Oh, and the closing track is an 8 minute ode to a deranged serial killer who murders people with a localized chemical agent that makes you violently shit until you die. Get back to me when you find another song like that.


Originally written for Lair of the Bastard