Supreme Art of Genital Carnage

No matter the country, no matter the genre and no matter how repugnant, it is always amazing to find hidden gems with a gory polish. 2017 was a year where I earned consistent income for the first time and you bet your kidney, I spent a lot of it on collecting. I am of the conviction that most of the albums I buy can be my favorite or at the least impress me. It may sound like I set myself up for disappointment but when bands like Septicopyemia pop up on my radar, I can’t help but feel vindicated. I found the band originally on the greatest pornogrind compilation ever made, A Tribute to Cock and Ball Torture. Their second album, SAoGC is, in a word: heavy. The hellish and grotesque album cover is a perfect visual representation of the album, which in turn is the perfect audial representation of what it’s probably like to be a demonic goblin. This is a long form way of saying the album is ferocious, it’s deadly, it’s hardcore, it’s groovy as shit. It’s a gem buried in the innards of Russian deathgrind: The Supreme Art of Genital Carnage.

What grips me about this album is a lot of things, and one of those is its sound. SAoGC is one of the sharpest and abrasive sounding albums I’ve heard without it being raw or unfinished like. Each instrument sounds finely tuned enough to equate to a weapon meant for slaughter. The guitar is like a chainsaw, buzzing and throbbing out riff after riff of total devastation. The drums, specifically the snare is like a knife rapidly hitting a cutting board with a brutal pop. The bass has a nauseatingly clear twang like a garrote wire cutting through the mix. The vocals, of which there are two, bubble and gurgle like a sizzling cesspool of sexual gore. All the instruments bring a unique flavor of violence and aggression that combine to make one of the most pleasantly heavy albums I’ve ever heard. The production is astonishingly clear for such a dirty album and every instrument has their own murderous presence. Not a single bad performance and the band’s synergy is cultish.

Now I mentioned that there are two vocal styles present, but what gives each of them their own twist is that this album has two vocalists. Dominator provides the guttural (pitchshifted?) lows and Malefactor provides the sickening highs. On the flip side however, though I say ‘high’ both these vocalists have a particularly low tone. It just so happens that Dominator’s is so low, and Malefactor is meant to provide moments on the opposite range. Speaking of, Malefactor has a crazy special voice as well. His growls, bellows and screams have this mix of a slight nasal-ness and sickliness to them. While I adore both vocalists on this album, their enunciation has some issues. Believe it or not, this album has printed lyrics but their essentially worthless for the listener. It’s not even a function of the band being Russian or using broken English with complex words, it’s that their performances only allow discernable lyrics about 10% of the time. Not a huge deal, but if you read along, you’ll stop at one point and end up another. It doesn’t even sound like Dominator is meaning to say anything, even though he is.

Of course, you can’t have an album without any mind-meltingly, head banging inducing songs. Thankfully, this album has great writing to match it’s great everything else. Groovy riffs are a plenty throughout the album and the chunky guitars are a prefect recipe to get you to mosh along. Standout moments include the ending breakdown on ‘Fistfuck Carnage’, the hook on ‘Razorcunt’ and the insane intermediate shouting match on ‘Emetic Sappho-Rough’. The album has a superb 6 hit combo of tracks starting from the first track, with 3 more amazing tracks sprinkled after. That isn’t to say all other tracks are worth ignoring, it’s just that they don’t standout as much. The songwriting is tight, but the structure of the album has some imperfections. The final track is a slower one and feels like if it swapped places with the more definitive track ‘Menstrual Intoxication’, then it would flow much better.

SAoGC is a fantastic album with the deathgrind label that borrows heavily from the groovy goregrind subgenre. This is their best release bar none and I hope they one day in the future make another full-length to match this one. This 23-minute album barrels past you with murderous and sexually deviant intent. If I had time to mull it over, this album could have a place in my top 10 albums of all time, at least as a representative of the genre. I adore this album and I adore this band. Brutal stuff!