Apparently US act Mausoleum are “the infernal purveyors of Zombiecult Death Metal” and one could wonder just where they interred themselves for the last thirteen years after releasing second album ‘Back From The Funeral’ in 2011. Defiling The Decayed is also notably manky, murky and maggoty and that’s down to the production. No doubt they wanted an authentic sound harking back to their glory days and it’s as though they have picked up directly where they left off without any regard for advances in recording techniques. The result is an album that is bass heavy and churns the guts via a dense sound. The only exception really, are the higher range flailing guitar leads that slither out the bowels of things, strike and on occasions simply drop off the face of the earth straight after. It’s all rather odd and takes a bit of getting used to but let’s open the crypt and cautiously explore.

With members serving time past and present in the likes of Morpheus Descended, Engorge, Incantation, Gehenna, Immolith and Discordance Axis the quartet have suitable credentials. Add to this an obvious love for zombies, gore and graveyards and rancid filth is quickly on display as they romp into ‘Beyond The Cemetery Gates’ armed with sledgehammers rather than picks and shovels. Main vocals are guttural and gargly and are backed up by other member’s feral tones occasionally behind them. There’s also some slow doomed Autopsy laden passages between the leaden charges and those odd solos are unleashed in an exuberant fashion and whiplash away over the top. There’s an obvious love of horror here and ‘Nine Eternities in Doom’ takes cues from ‘The Abominable Doctor Phibes’ complete with Vincent Price samples along with some melody lines which sound like they have escaped from that famous Morningside Mausoleum in Phantasm. No doubt you will also probably notice that there’s a sped up homage to Halloween going down on ‘Clawing the Lid of the Coffin.’

If this were a film it would be on a degraded VHS tape, there isn’t the slightest shine of high definition put on things here and at times the slow moving dead lurch and shuffle to the plodding morass of numbers such as ‘Curse Of The Tomb’ and you wonder why potential victims simply don’t just run away. With ‘Catacombs of Eternal Dread’ there’s some crusty groove and film wise again I get visions of the fiery underground battle beneath the graveyard on ‘The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue.’ You know what happens to the out of his depth copper in that scene, cue the eviscerating gut-munch of ‘Gravefucked.’

I guess this one is all down to how you approach it and at least what you are going to get is acknowledged by the line descriptor that this is “the perfect embodiment of the pre-digital era Death Metal sound.” Some, myself included, may well find this the stumbling block though but there’s no shortage of ghoulish spirit from the players. Sometimes it was a tough chore making it to the end of those aforementioned tapes but at least unlike copies of those such as ‘Tombs of the Blind Dead’ (who I notice got a song dedicated to them on the first Mausoleum album) you can rest assured this is uncut. Oh and the title track, reminds a fair bit of the deceased gods of this sort of things Necrophagia but if I’m being brutally honest this one just isn’t quite up there compared to the gruesome excesses of ‘Holocausto de la morte.’

(6.5/10 Pete Woods)

https://www.facebook.com/thezombiecult

https://thezombiecult.bandcamp.com/album/defiling-the-decayed