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Stabwound > Bloodsoaked Serenades > Reviews
Stabwound - Bloodsoaked Serenades

The Ancient Art of Slam - 90%

The_Evil_Hat, May 23rd, 2009

Stabwound are a slam death metal band. I’m aware that most people aren’t a fan of the genre, and I’m generally not, either. At the same time, Stabwound manage to be head and shoulders above every other brutal death metal band I’ve ever heard. They seem to embody everything that’s great about the genre, and leave out all the icky, repetitive and wiggerish bits.

This EP is pretty damn short, at only around eleven minutes, but it doesn’t need to be any longer to make its point, although, to be fair, I usually throw it on as a little epilogue after listening to the full length. Each of the four songs is highly distinctive, and if you’re looking for an even mix of tremolo picked blasting and slam chugging, you’re not going to find it here.

Everything on this EP is razor sharp, and precise to an incredible degree. It’s not tech death in the sense that everything’s playing nothing but sweeps, but you can tell that the band members are masters of their instruments. The various rhythms on this album are great, and always offbeat enough to make it highly entertaining and original. The guitars play highly varied riffs, all of which are supremely heavy, despite generally not being particularly slow. Pinch harmonics are used quite frequently, but as opposed to in most bands within the genre, this actually works. The bass is quite audible, but never does all that much here.

The drumming is a highlight. It’s lightening fast, and makes use of a variety of techniques, including blasting and double bass drum passages. It exhibits the ability to change tempos and styles on a dime, and displays perfectly timed rolls on tracks like Bloated Brain Implow. The vocals are quite diverse, and range frequently between shrieks, growls and the dreaded pig squeal, which manages to avoid sounding downright obnoxious on here.

The whole thing has a delicious tongue-in-cheek feel to it. The riffs are over the top, the vocals and drumming is over the top, and it all just comes back around again and works. For instance, on Intestinal Impalement there’s a harmony between pick squeals and pig squeals, and it’s damn awesome, as well as utterly hilarious. The lyrics and song titles reinforces this atmosphere perfectly, with tracks like the Ancient Art of Gutting begining as follows: “Hung inverted/Exhumation of entrails/Unable to resist/As the knife slowly slits/Open the abdomen like the elders taught you/Embrace and feel the warmth of inner organs/Pull them out, desecrate the torso of this corpse deliciti.”

This EP is damn near flawless. The only slight annoyance is the ambient intro to Ancient Art of Gutting and the outro to As I Watch You Bleed Again, because I simply fail to see why a slam band needs to try and establish ambience. Still, they add up to at most two minutes of the music, and the rest of it is simply excellent. If you like brutal death metal at all, you’ll love this. If not, you still might. Either way, make sure to get Human Boundaries first, as it’s basically a longer version of this.