It’s a pathologist’s worse nightmare. The body is laid out on the slab, the y-shaped incision is made, rib-cage prized open and removal of organs commences. Up to nuts in guts and carefully placing, liver, lungs and other offal in steel dishes when an emergency call comes in. The distraction is brief but long enough, as when our forensic examiner returns, the previously deceased cadaver is sitting up and unravelling intestines with a bemused but blood-thirsty look on its face. Should have removed the brain first. This is what is known in deeply hushed up circles as half an Autopsy. And so, in fact is this! The musical medical deviants behind Static Abyss should really need little introduction to fans of gore and grind as we have here none other than Greg Wilkinson (guitar / bass) and Chris Reifert (drums / vocals) and if that doesn’t sound like a veritable grizzly banquet, I don’t know what is.

Speaking of feasts, the first of 10 courses served up are the squishy delicacy of the eyes. Here our gruesome twosome set up trademark surging brutal barrages and slow creepy crawls that make up the template of this death doom monster; often both facets occupying the same song. The vocals are full of gurgling snarls and the drums at full pace leaden and stomping. The slow guitar parts sound like a choir of weeping angels as the soul is gathered to take on a final journey, be it to heaven or hell and the bass tones deliciously morbid. Sometimes Reifert sounds like he is having an inner dialogue, arguing with God and perhaps his consciousness which is urging him out to go and butcher his next victim. His evil side definitely wins through on the 99 second savagery that is ‘You Are What You Kill’ and the rough and tumble of ‘Mandatory Cannibalism’ with wild swearing and turmoil has that schizophrenic fervour of The Ravenous before slowing down and citing very early Paradise Lost.

It’s all surgically precise but at times guaranteed to leave a very sick taste. Case in point is getting the full effects of the lyrical content by watching the Matt Vickerstaff video for the title track, a mondo death film waltz of macabre horror. Compared to it, next track ‘Jawbone Ritual’ is not only a wonderful title but also absolutely rabid at start, complete with bouncy pogoing pace and reverb ridden vocal vomits and harrowing screams as the red mist of doom descends. I’m just glad that any reanimation is kept off camera as one wouldn’t know whether these zombies were slow or fast moving. They are certainly rather bitey if ‘Contort Until Death’ is concerned and the best description for this one is simply “sick” before the slow lumbering sheer weight of the aggressors bring you down in the ‘Tectonic Graveyard.’

No doubt you are now well-versed in all the foul flavours this has to offer and fans of Autopsy, Abscess and related acts are going to be delirious on discovery of Static Abyss. Seemingly from out of nowhere this has clawed to the top of the dead pile and if you are a fan of the genre, dished up by its masters, this one really is a no-brainer which just so happens to bring us completely full-circle.

(8.5/10 Pete Woods)

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https://peaceville.bandcamp.com/album/labyrinth-of-veins