Prenatal Massacre

Necrocest gained quite a bit of notoriety with their debut full length “Dead Pretty” (in fact, I’ve just realised that I added the band to the Metal Archives back when it came out in 2004). 5 years of veritable silence later (bar a lot of touring, naturally), they’ve finally inflicted their sophomore album into the world, like a snotting and screaming cankerous malignant baby.

For me, it’s a relief to actually hear some UK death metal that isn’t some half arsed sub-core garbage passing itself off as death metal once again (yes, and you can forget all that hyped up faceless bollocks like Trigger the Bloodshed too – THIS is the shit). Taking about half a trees worth of paper from Cannibal Corpse’s book for the most part musically, Necrocest also throw in large rotten slabs of the likes of Lividity and Devourment to the rancid stew, allowing their sound to fester into their own twisted monstrosity. From the very off, riff upon riff is set loose, attacking the senses like a rabid wolverine, clawing and snapping its yellow teeth at your face. Of course, with this being at the gorier end of the death metal spectrum, the vocals do occasionally slip into the unintelligible “weebeedeebeedoobeedooooo” pig squeals and guttural gurgles. But for the most part they’re a powerful deathly bark which sounds awesome tangled in amongst the thick strangulated riffage, cacophonous artificial harmonic shrieking and the mauling clicky drum battery.

The fact that these guys aren’t on a proper label is a joke when you consider some of the crap that the bigger labels are passing off as death metal nowadays. Fair enough, I personally think there are generally more shit bands in this field of metal than any other (the US seem to have about a million crappy gore death metal bands alone). However, one listen to ‘Prenatal Massacre’ is enough to convince you that Necrocest are still one of the most exciting prospects for UK death metal. Well worth looking into – support!