It's been a pretty great year for Death Metal. This Cleveland band is going to the pack in making raw-boned death metal that leans into the grooves. This looks you into the assault of "Skin Milk". It also raises the bar for this band regarding what I am going to expect from them as I delve deeper into this album. "Tow Rope Around the Throat" tricked me into thinking that it was still the previous song, meaning they do not have the most dynamic sound. There is a uniform density to the guitars. The vocals also just stay down in the low muffled guttural zone. At times there are effects on the vocals that provide a slight shift in the colors of the vocals. But largely this band thrives from the chug of guitars.
"Itty Bitty Pieces" slows that chug down to an almost death-doom tempo. The guitar playing is really great for the flavor of death metal these guys are churning out that is not normally known for nuance. The way they play with the ambiance of feedback reminds me of Slayer. They do not really pour on the speed til the end of the song and four songs in they have shown restraint in this regard. This trend is broken on "Phallic Filth". You can hear more of a metal core influence creep in with the title track. It attacks with very relentlessly dense riffage. "Drilling You Head" has a syncopation that reminds me of Carcass.
The last two work of a more commonplace brutality that finds the band grinding to into grave that has been occupied by most bands in this sub-genre of death metal. The last song has more nuance and uses syncopation to separate it from the previous song even when they dig into more travelled paths. I will give this album a 9, it is a great deal of head-banging fun, and freshens a corpse that could have rotted in the hands of less capable songwriters. This is dropping on Metal Blade this week.
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