Sewer Skullpture

The frozen-grim-woods horror movie vibe of the synth line that opens up Vacant Coffin's Sewer Skullpture is only misleading if you're entirely unfamiliar with the Razorback Records aesthetic. For the uninitiated, Razorback's roster is populated by a number of vaguely old-school sounding death metal acts. Deep vocals, ultra-sludgy guitars and a cartoonish horror vibe are all signature elements of Razorback and its bands and Vacant Coffin are certainly no exception. Unlike the Hooded Menaces and Acid Witches, however, Finland's Vacant Coffin specialize in a filthy flavor of grindy death metal that owes more than a little debt to early Carcass and Impetigo. Luckily for everyone, the band has really done their homework and the result is an utterly convincing slab of gory death metal goodness.

The band favors the "short and sweet" approach when it comes to songwriting. You won't find many extended melodic bits, almost nowhere are there dragging doom sections (rare is the grind band that keeps those interesting, anyway) and two minute songs aren't stretched out to five by use of snore-inducing horror movie samples. In fact, the utter lack of samples is probably the most avant-garde aspect of Sewer Skullpture and I've gotta say it's pretty refreshing. In fact, the synth-laden intro mentioned earlier is the only part of the album the band doesn't spend kicking your ass with pummeling riffery. The one time the band does apply the brakes and let the melody flow, the second half of "Gut Worship," they come across sounding like a cross between the closing of Entombed's "Left Hand Path" and the beginning of Necrophobic's "The Nocturnal Silence," which is just fine by me.

When a band is making so little effort to rewrite the rulebook when brainstorming riffs like these, half the fun of the results comes from the guitar tone. Satan be praised, then, because the tone employed on this album thicker than Rob Dukes and greasier than a KFC Double Down. The bass tone is fuzzier than a tribble and contributes greatly to the ridiculous tonal density of the album. The riffs themselves hop back and forth between staccato thrashy goodness and Bolt-Thrower-on-speed tremolo lines. In fact, the whole affair sort of sounds like what would happen if Bolt thrower took their riff vocabulary from ...For Victory and tried to use that to re-write In Battle There Is No Law. Even the fastest, most chaotic stuff on the album maintains a sense of groove and coherence and never do the riffs take a backseat to the blastbeats as is all too common on the grindier end of the death metal continuum. The solos, when Lasse finds time for them, are short and sweet but have an unexpected level of "pretty" melodicism. The drumming is energetic and punky and the fills are sufficiently pummeling. Pekka blasts at all the right times and really works the groove on the (slightly) slower bits. Like the guitar playing on this album, the drumming is far from unusual but is executed perfectly. The vocal approach really isn't too dissimilar from the clearly influential Impetigo and screams and other variations from a gurgly growl are used when appropriate. This is a release that idolizes the old school, however, so you won't find any shrieking or pitch shifted splattering or anything of the sort.

Like most (all?) of the bands on Razorback, Vacant Coffin's influences are out in the open, as is their target demographic. If even your pinky finger falls into this demographic (i.e. fandom of rotten proto-goregrind) you'll get some measure of enjoyment out of this album and anyone with a healthy appreciation of old school death metal will likely find himself having a good headbanging session while listening to this album's sixteen brief but furious songs. Vacant Coffin are perfectly content with carrying the torch rather than breaking new ground, and that's perfectly fine with me.