Well, at the very least Rotpit gets the best “AC/DC adjacent album pun of the month” award, with the amusing moniker “Let There Be Rot”. Turns out Rotpit are a project featuring the ever-prolific Jonny Pettersson (here on bass and guitars), Henrik Posingis on the old drums, and Ralf Hauber on the vocals.
Between them, they’ve got some heavy pedigree in death metal, being involved in such bands as Wombbath, Massacre, Berzerker Legion, Revel In Flesh and Heads For The Dead. These aren’t fellows who are new to the genre. So what are they playing here? Well, to be fair, albeit the blurb mentions influences from old Finnish and British Death Metal, and while I can hear those influences loud and proud in the tracks here, I think it’s fair to say that whilst this is clearly a collection based on older influences, it has plenty of newer tricks up its sleeve.
A good example of what to expect here is the title track, “Let There Be Rot”. This is a mid-tempo, gnarled stomper. It has everything you might expect – the super-distorted, down-tuned axe work, the sickeningly bubbling bass and the stygian drum sound. The vocals are a throaty, phlegmy growl. So far, so standard. Yet “Let there be rot” slows things down to a crawl, and then packages the whole thing in a punchy hole, with some excellent production.
Throughout the nine tracks here, there’s a common mix of the familiar with the addition of some modern touches. Personally, I enjoyed tracks that saw that old Benediction approach of fairly simple death metal riffing mixed with some old school filthy grind, as in the clattering discordance of “Beastfeaster” and the feedback-ridden scream of “Deathtrip”.
The nine tracks soon speed past, and all in all it’s a pretty fun listen. I wouldn’t say that anything here is going to change the world, but then I don’t think that’s the intention. This is a celebration of the old ways; when there were fun riffs and titles like “Shitburner”.
(6.5/10 Chris Davison)
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