There’s nothing that will get you out of bed quicker than a lovely dollop of death metal on a Wednesday morning, but rather than provide a shining beacon of light into what can be best described as a shithole of day weather wise as we plunge headfirst into the festive season, Czech metallers, Cutterred Flesh, provide a suitably bleak, foul-smelling pillow on which to lay your head. Returning with this their fifth full length effort, I must profess, that I have never heard of this band until it turned up as an option to review for this esteemed site. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’ so some toothless Cockney sex worker might say, before being eviscerated on the cold, wet cobbled streets of Whitechapel by a naughty lad called Jack. Well, they wouldn’t actually, because those killings came well before decimalisation (15th February 1971 fact fans) and so you’d probably have to swap out pound for shillings…anyway, that’s about as far I can credibly stretch such a meandering non sequitur.
Anyway, back to the music and it’s an odd one really, and this review would be far easier if the band hadn’t, at times, thrown a few nuggets of gold into the mix, like a struck off back street dentist attempting to repair a mouth full of broken teeth. If I weren’t a diligent and fair minded fan of music, then this review could quite easily write itself being, as it is, another entry into the tech/progressive death metal genre that does little to stray from it’s lane, mixing slow crunchy middle eights, with a side order of pinballing double bass drums and blast beats with a dressing of guitar gymnastics that recall a less interesting Decapitated or a more subdued Suffocation (I use these comparisons loosely as some of the music featured on this album, wouldn’t stand up to these aforementioned bands work in any shape, way or form).
Cutting to the chase, as the album draws to a close, you could (if you were feeling less than generous) simply write this album off as another entry into an already crowded genre that doesn’t do much to improve, add or innovate on anything that has gone before it. The crunchy parts are crunchy, the slower parts groove and the fast parts are fast and competent in as far as they are well played and well produced. But, if you were to see Cutterred Flesh at a death metal festival, even if you had seen them during what I like to call the ‘golden hour’, when the excesses of the day before have been driven away by two to three pints of fizzy cold lager and the sun is at its zenith and all is good with the world, you would struggle to pick these Czech’s out of a line up of which they were the only participants.
But I’ll caveat much of what I have just spewed out and pivot slightly and offer a case for the defence. There are moments during the early parts of this album on songs such as ‘Black Aurora’ and ‘Where Only the Old Flesh Stinks’ (about as an ‘on the nose’ death metal song title as you can get) where I feel the true heart of Cutterred Flesh lies. Because, in all honesty, if they want to compete at the death metal big boys table, eighty percent of this album is simply, as Lars Ulrich may suggest, ‘stock’. But on these two songs (and sporadically throughout the album’s duration), there are elements of guitar work, that feature just enough layers of complexity, innovation and genuine song writing talent that does just enough to lift this album above it’s middle of the road fate. It’s in these passages, when the band stray from the path well-trodden by thousands of bands before them, that you can see a chink of light and come to the sudden realisation that Cutterred Flesh, could be a band worthy of further attention. If they can extrapolate and develop upon on these moments of genuine inventiveness on their next album, then the band may have a genuine chance of being who they quite obviously aspire to be.
(7/10 Nick Griffiths)
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