Distortion and reverb can be used to hide a multitude of sins or else to turbo-charge the fuel rods of your armoured car ride into the caverns of the underworld. Doom loving death metal crew Corrosive Carcass have finally loomed out of the back waters of demo hell like some filthy demonic killer trying to tear through the fabric of our reality with its plague infected claws.
Gritty and full of surprises, this has taken the best part of a decade to surface and will include tracks, like Corrosive Carcass standard Awesome Nuclear Power, that Swedish death metal aficionados may have come across before. In fact half the tracks are featured on 2010’s self-released 18 minute demo Rot.In.Pieces. Line up changes are to blame for their laboured trek to record label support but whatever else that has done it hasn’t taken away from what is a pretty confident and individual sound. Composition of Flesh undoubtedly owes something to the pervasive Swedish death metal sound but it also tears up its own dark and ominous furrow.
With most tracks blistering through at less than three minutes the first few strikes of this release may have you thinking this is just another Swedeath metal joy ride. But the clues are drip fed with the occasional doomy riff and surprisingly soulful guitar solos. By the second half the sound gradually becomes more expansive and the final five tracks rounds things off by gleefully jumping up and down on the eviscerated products of the first 20 minutes. From the Black Sabbath drop of Collector with its eerie acoustic interlude and the thrash attack of Hunger which comes complete with a killer riff after a couple of minutes – inspired by a band that I am still dredging my poor addled brain to place (answers on a postcard or blood splattered parchment, please).
Then we’re on to the epic finale – a last trudge through the Corrosive Carcass doom death hell, with the emphasis on this last occasion on the doom just in case you we’re beginning to think this was all becoming predictable.
Entombed is an obvious inspiration here but I also found myself thinking of very old school thrash impersonators like Vomitor which I always think have an atmospheric twist bordering on the psychedelic. It’s always tempting to regard this kind of late-in-the-career debut as something that’s been cobbled together, like a ‘best of’ from the past eight years. Too often works like that risk being disjointed as the band rushes to unload their collected ideas into the recording studio. But there is a cohesiveness here that allows Composition of Flesh to escape that trap. This is a venerable recording for a band already well into its career and you can’t help wondering where they might have got to by now if they had got an opportunity as good as this five years ago.
(8/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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