It’s time to go down deep, to the sewer of metal where all the slime festers and dead things lurk in decay and foul odour. The man behind ‘Larvae Offal Swine’ should need no introduction being Pete Helmkamp who has caused much abrasive musical suffering with acts such as Angelcorpse, Revenge and Order Of Chaos. Here he goes it nearly alone with the help from a session drummer and promises to bring this project into the live arena in the future. The title of the album sounds like it could be dished up with a coating of puke by Lucifer Valentine and would no doubt fit in very well with his fetid filmic output such as the Slaughtered Vomit Doll trilogy, with that image in my mind I pressed play somewhat cautiously preparing to be showered with all manner of degradation and filth and it was no surprise that after an intro of droning noise and bestial contorted vocals I found myself wallowing up to my neck in a real musical nasty.
You probably know exactly what to expect before confronting this and rest assured it is only for the hardiest listener of extremity. ‘Buried With Pig’ has a crunching drum sound that is akin to bones being pulverised, guitars and bass grate and grind away and vocals rasp without a shred of humanity or mercy about them. It’s a scummy miasma of death and black worship with some slowed down doom-laden segments and you can almost smell the stench exuding from it like offal and pus and all things that are best discovered on a morticians slab before being catalogued and buried deep in the bowels of the earth. You are immediately aware that listening to this is going to be an intense and rugged endurance test and check out the running time to see how long you have to survive. Luckily unless you are a real masochist you will find that tracks here are fast and brutally plated up and you have less than half an hour to be dragged through them.
Titles sum up just how horrid this is. ‘Crown Of Flies,’ ‘Black Magus Whitehouse’ all delivering visions that should only exist in a killers fractured psyche. All through this the vocals spit and spew, incessantly tempering the brutal barbarism of the music like Helmkamp is having the time of your death and wallowing in the midst of it all playing with maggoty entrails. The occasional slow downed doom parts show that it is not all about thwacking away and clattering hellishly as he “worships shit” and tears up flesh strewing it around with wild abandon and draping it all over the musical butchers shop. Sometimes words can be made out quite clearly especially if you listen on headphones and unsurprisingly things are far from pleasant. You are going to need the right tools to dig out the actual melodic grooves amidst it all but they are there and even in one case there’s a burst of jazzy bass work that is going to be a surprise on first encounter.
The album finishes with an outro wrapping it up like a corpse in much the way it started. You will not have enjoyed it in the slightest but the catharsis of surviving is reward enough. Put it down, feel guilty about having played it and find yourself drawn back like flies to shit later; ugh!
(7/10 Pete Woods)
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