Monumental Putrescence

Man, Xtreem Music sure does still seem concerned with putting out solid records. Funeral Vomit hail from Canada and, when they claim to play "raw rotten death metal", they truly mean it (contrarily to many other young bands exploiting such tags to just offer a slightly more vintage-laden version of banal modern slam death). The musical influences these guys pride themselves with are indeed true "rotten death metal" staples and cult names such as Infester, Autopsy, Mortician, Crematory and Funebre - along with some barbaric war metal touches in the vein of Bestial Warlust, Archgoat and Blasphemy. This sounds like a pretty spot-on description of what you're going to find on the band's debut album, aptly titled "Monumental Putrescence".

Songs on this album are indeed little filthy affairs alternating mostly between crushing slow tempos possessing a morbid, ominous, cavernous feel (where the band can show their taste for dirgelike melodies in the true old school death fashion - see: "The Mortuary Moon", the title-track and the mammoth-like ending of "Cadaveric Apparition") and primitive blasting sections filled with minimal riffing and a general sense of aggression more akin to war metal than anything else (see: the delightfully chaotic "Necromantical Winds"), plus the occasional Autopsy/Nihilist d-beat punk influence (see: the title-track). It's all fairly basic stuff really, but Funeral Vomit arranges it in a way that makes these songs purposeful and fulfilling to hear instead of being just a laundry list of automatically generated tropes: the impeccably smooth flowing between riffs on tracks like "Spectral Parasite", "Cadaveric Apparition" and "Necromantical Winds", or the seamless transitions between crushing dirges and messy blasting sections on "Swarming Pestilence" (in the best Incantation fashion), say all you need to know about the band's songwriting skills.

None of the ingredients presented here is outstanding on its own, but everything is performed impeccably as far as this style of death metal goes. The presence of horror-like synth interludes on this album contributes to further cement the band's sonic goals, achieving a wise balance between atmosphere (which tends to be entirely forgotten on modern plastic tech/brutal death) and primal violence (which on the other hand is toned down on many atmospheric/dissodeath efforts which have attempted to recover and exalt the most introspective aspects of the genre during the last decade) - and that's basically how old school death metal is truly supposed to be played. If you're into generally primitive, filthy stuff, "Monumental Putrescence" is pretty much a safe bet.

Published in Italian language on Black Metal Ist Krieg webzine.