I mean black and white scratchy ink drawing cover, the name and the album title complete with K and V. And to top it off the label. You can kinda guess what slippery, fetid slope we’re on here can’t you? Yep this is death metal baaybee….. And even better than that as the fuzzy chord of ‘Strangled by Entrails’ lurches into the utterly filthy, tar soaked bass heavy riff this is brutal, grimy, primordial death metal. The opener churns and grinds and slips the clutch to find more gears than any vehicle this ramshackle has any right to have. It’s like a mutant truck, all rust and gaffa tape suddenly roaring into life and just barrelling straight through a wall.
Yeah, that’s a fantastic way to start.
‘Epidemic Disembowelment’ shudders to a slow crawl, a surprisingly clean(ish) bit of guitar before the chainsaw grind begins. It’s dark as hell, thick and cloying and when it picks up speed I kind of turn feral.
This is the first full length from the Swiss three piece after an EP five years back and a couple of demos and depending on your point of view they play like old school veterans, or the kind of dank, mulch crawling mutants that live in that dodgy sewer outlet. Either is good. The huge bass and general down-tuned sound is just spot on, the production excellent for the sound and the whole approach is, for me, what the best death metal sounds like; unclean, unhinged and held together by rusty wire and caked on shit.
‘Morbid Decomposition’ has a rotten groove to it, that rhythmic approach never meaning the aggression is back-pedalled on and when it kicks up and blasts it’s like a derelict building shaking. ‘Putrefaktor’ has a little nod to Hellhammer in its winding, blurred riff and sudden accelerator stomp, just weighed down by more cavernous darkness and slime-mould. Music to chain skeletons to the walls by. ‘Symbiotic Putrefaction’ is a nasty, basic assault slowing only to watch the flesh turn green. ‘Chapel Of Abhorrent Reek And Festering Slime’ is a perfect, eerie little bridge into ‘Tormenting Fungal Infestation’; a fine raw chugger, spreading clouds of spores with the nasty, deranged vocals and an off balance guitar ‘melody’. ‘Gut Asphyxiation’ is another Hellhammer-esque surge from a dark cloud of chaos. Primitive yes but still with a fantastic glee to its tightening grip. The title track is eighty two seconds of heads down ripping and the almost punky vibe to the drilling death metal riff is just awesome.
And then we get twelve minutes of the closing track ‘Carnivorous Cult’. Vomitheist certainly flex their muscles a little on this one. I’m not the greatest fan of this style of death metal stretching things out, but I have to say the midsection grinding crawl, Celtic Frost played in a Hellhammer style, really works with like waves of muck rising and breaking as some subterranean river disposes of the evidence. Maybe I’d have put the title track last as it does go out in three minutes of sludge style crawling chords but, honestly, that feels like nit-picking even to me somehow.
Yes, NekroFvneral is a horrible, dank, putrid mess of an album. It grinds, it envelopes and it pumells, and then it blasts the results into splatter one the walls.
Which is awesome. Excuse me I need a shower….
(8/10 Gizmo)
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