Carrion for Worm

This is an ugly, ugly album in every respect. From the disturbed-child artwork to the hollow/bassy production to the unhinged lyrics, everything about this LP makes it one of the most disgusting works of art in extreme metal history. Brutal death metal is passé; writing lyrics about gore and necrophilia is easy. But it takes a special kind of disturbed to write for Nuclear Death.

Carrion for Worm is often dismissed as another cassette-fi deathgrind release while debut LP Bride of Insect gets the underground attention. (This says nothing of how little playtime All Creatures Great and Eaten typically receives.) While it does continue the kind of all-out aggression of Bride of Insect, it has several major differences that make this a singularly unique experience.

For one, this is the first release to have Steve Cowan on drums rather than Joel Whitfield, who exited the band after recording Bride of Insect. Whitfield's drumming was strongly suited to the band's thrashier days on the Wake Me When I'm Dead and Welcome to the Minds of the Morbid demos, where he smacks those snares in true hardcore punk fashion. But on the band's faster and fastest moments, he often had difficulty keeping up - as shown on the live tracks within the A Symphony of Agony semi-bootleg and the Vultures Feeding demo. His stilted rapid-fire drumming worked well for Bride of Insect, but it wasn't the strongest part of that album.

In contrast, Steve Cowan foregoes trying to play quadruple-speed all and every way. He gives way more room in the album to flow rather than keep up. Cowan's background in jazz drumming (per interviews with frontwoman Lori Bravo) shows up in his halfway-improvisational style, where tracks like "Greenflies", "A Dark Country", "Cathedral of Sleep", and "The Human Seed" show him weaving in and out of the guitars rather than trying to play a straight rhythm section. I'd argue that Nuclear Death's second-strongest aspect in their entire career (next to Bravo herself) is Cowan. He just gives this album an experimental flair that portends the band's evolution toward avant-garde music in general. The themes in all Nuclear Death albums are certainly not normal, and it's with the addition of Cowan that the instruments fully reflect that off-ness.

Another extreme difference (both in dissimilarity as well as intensity) is the hollow production. Not cavernous - Incantation isn't on the death metal board yet - but hollow. Bride of Insect is somewhat infamous for its grainy production compared to the demos; while Carrion for Worm is not hi-fi by any means, it has this fungal, rotting sound that de-emphasizes most instruments while adding a layer of careful reverb and phasing. This is most prominent in the guitars, as heard right off the bat with "Spawn Song" as the instruments sound like they're permanently revving up. The bass is simultaneously overdriven and curiously lacking, like fuzz but sharp ("Cathedral of Sleep" and "Homage to Morpheus"). "Greenflies" features these echoing, lasting shrieks from Bravo that fade into the mix before being stifled as with a wet cloth. "Return of the Feasting Witch" buries Bravo's muttermouth vocals just a bit, adding another layer of percussion that once again filters in and out of Cowan's drumming. "Vampirism" begins with guitar squelks like cries for help. If Cowan made Nuclear Death weirder on an instrumental level, then the production emphasized the band's sheer wrongness.

Much of Nuclear Death's earlier material could be described as morbid tales for morbid folks. Carrion for Worm is transgressive. It's probably here where Bravo pushes as far as possible into the realm of madness, and it occasionally goes into what passes for bad taste in deathgrind. I'm aware that sounds a little hypocritical of me - intense music for intense people, right? Well, Carrion for Worm crosses the line of fantasy into ghoulishness in a way that is a bit uncomfortable.

Bravo very often explored concepts of rape in her music - practically every Nuclear Death release has a song about implied or experienced assault. Carrion for Worm is no exception; several tracks detail this exact concept. The title track is the one that lapses into just being... too much, as it explores the rape of a younger sibling while a "side show freak" eats his way out of her. Again: hard music, meet hard person - but it's the kind of difference between, say, Controlled Bleeding and Whitehouse in how they approach appalling semi-realities. There's also "Lurker in the Closet: A 'Fairy' Tale", which is a direct attack on male gay experiences and implies that homosexuality is a result of childhood trauma (or that homosexual experiences beget childhood trauma), as that said "little boy" should "just die". One can make the argument that Bravo is just playing yet another terrible character, but it feels mean where Nuclear Death wasn't necessarily about being mean; "fucking dead animals", perhaps (see: A Symphony of Agony). It's a fine distinction that's going to be up to the individual listener - the tortured existence of Nuclear Death is definitely, well, tortured. And yet, Carrion for Worm also has some of Bravo's most terrifically evocative lyrics ("Proposing to be Impaled", "The Human Seed"), which read like short stories Poe could only dream of.

I have a few friends who love Bride of Insect but can't make it through Carrion for Worm, with both subject matter and production just being too much. I really like this album - it's an incredibly challenging work of art that is as experimental as deathgrind would be for the decade before !T.O.O.H.! or Contrastic. Yet, that comes with the caveat of the subject matter being at its most vile. Maybe it straddles the line for you, maybe it camps over the line, and maybe such a line doesn't exist in the first place. Whatever goes, I think anyone who got into the underground American death metal classic of Bride of Insect should step further into the mire with Carrion for Worm. You might get sucked in, or you might need a shower. Either way, my dumb metaphors end here.

Arizona’s Nuclear Death stand a good contender for being the strangest, most extreme and altogether most bizarre death metal band ever. They had in their ranks a female bassist/vocalist (Lori Bravo) who possessed one of the most otherworldly styles in the genre. Alternately growling and passionately shrieking, she brings a unique manner to the band’s lyrics. Oh yeah, about those lyrics. They are sick…really sick. Not sick in a gore sense, but in a personal and demented sense. Thank guitarist Phil Hampson for this, as his literate, poetic and singular view of all things living as debased garbage makes this band’s poetics both revolting in theme but compelling in their delivery. Sex with dead animals, cannibalism on one’s deceased family members, transsexual vampirism, homosexual necrophilia, heroin addiction and a fascination with decay are all visited. It’s also hard to describe the band’s sound, as their records are often poorly balanced, creating a sound that comes across as a mush of indistinct yet carefully penned arrangements. Doomy breakdowns give way to grindcore velocity, but the guitars remain a wash of static, underpinned by Bravo’s grave utterances. Imagine Autopsy at their most warped, and you’ll get the idea of where this band’s essence begins. The drums are nice and booming, which on the slower tracks like “Greenflies” adds clarity. But the Nuclear Death sound is not built on an easy digestion of it’s contents. Death metal this perverse is best delivered in the sonically obscure form the band use here. For me, this is the most sustained work of depravity they’d invent. Their debut Bride Of Insect is equally disturbing sound wise though less diverse, but the lyrics are slightly less warped. Slight future work emerged, the band moving even further underground following membership hassles. But for those of you who tire of the paradox of clearly produced, precise and sterile death metal, Nuclear Death is the clear antithesis. I’m not saying you’ll like them (it took many, many spins on my part before I “got” their approach) but I can’t imagine death metal more aptly deserving of unimpeachable entry into it’s particular genre.

More fucked up psychosis from these gals from Arizona. I have already ranted on how they are women and how women cannot play metal, but they can. I have already mentioned the anomaly of these women laying it down harder than three quarters of men fronted bands. Read my other review for them for that the one I submitted for ‘Bride of Insect’. This review shall be about the music. A great friend of mine, Necrofaust of Concrete fame mentioned this band as the ‘Beherit of Death Metal’. That is basically correct. They do the genre what Beherit did for black metal. Basically, it is noisy as all hell death metal with raw sound and no emphasis on technicality, but rather on sound and on atmosphere, sometimes even to the detriment of the musicianship, a concept the ladies did not care so much about. But they did not have to, they more than make up for it in sheer creepiness and nightmarish quality of their music. In this album Chris Reifert also makes a special appearance and does his sick ass vocals, which honestly I think are far outdone by the ladies in this band. You have to know that Chris is a great vocalist in my opinion and I love his work, but this lady can fucking scream and bellow like few others can, and her grunts put many men in the metal scene into deep shame, and perhaps even causes a case of vagina envy.
This band gets linked to death/grind bands, and bands like Napalm Death often, and I have no idea why. Really I cannot imagine a connection at all, especially after hearing this album. This band sounds like a mix between Autopsy, Winter and Embalmer. That is the best I can make their music out to be, and even that is missing the mark in how tremendously weird and quirky their music is. They just write really unique music, perhaps it is because their approach is different, seeing as they are after all women. A woman’s perception on violence, remember, might be radically different from a man’s, especially when it comes to causing violence. So when it comes to writing music abut violence, this might be why Nuclear Death stands out so much, but I am not too convinced. All I know is that they play some really insane psycho death metal that is not to be missed.

Here is a band that once took the musical extremities of eighties grind, while likewise building and building the extremity-ladder. They drove the bar further with their demos and debut; which I think those subsequently turned out great. They left open some relatable areas and were still essentially a non-conforming band that found creative energy in a thought-to-be lesser genre. "Carrion for Worm" came about and they would keep pushing, but I feel they pushed past an area, missed the target and knocked themselves off balance here for a few different reasons, not to mention losing some of their experimental edge.

On "Carrion for Worm," Nuclear Death took a different approach than on their first album "Bride of Insect." The main focus is bass, and plenty of it. Ranging from the extremely down tuned guitars, deep vocals, erupting bass guitar and weighted drums. Lori even decided to use much more low and grunting vocals, mixing this with some genuinely felt screams. Just when you think a female voice box can only go so deep, this album shatters the measure of what you might have heard. In a way her vocals actually match the musical direction N.D. is going for on this how-low-can-you-go sounding album. Unfortunately, it is mostly one-dimensional and essentially gives the album a limited tone and direction. The overall feel here is equivalent to leaving the room for a drink and returning to lose track of which song you're actually on.

One of the main focal points here is the guitars, which are, not surprisingly, downtuned and maxed out at the bass tone knob. On "Bride of Insect" they were more of a humming, chainsaw-like buzz. This different path hurts this album at points, because they are barely heard and sound very scratch-like in the background by meshing together with the equally low bass guitar; it's like a truck passing you by on the last recording to now a train roaring past, the limitations of your ears just gave your brain, which is supposed to process incoming information, something like a never-ending series of sound farts as a result. On the drums, the snare is the primary aspect heard, with an insane amount of reverb and possibly a mild amount of echo. I think they went with whichever effects would aid to a more outrageous projection, even to the point of being barely perceptible; God forbid you've got a washing machine or dishwasher going, it would be competing with the ear-straining static. One of his signatures is to hit his snare harder than usual to accent certain fills, as if he's using more arm than wrist. It's almost like he is rigorously attempting to climb the barricade of instruments by doing so.

Nuclear Death suddenly took a road of a no-holds-barred brutal death-grind sound, and I'm sure they paved the way for other bands to take note of how far the genre can be pushed. At the time of this recording I'm sure N.D. were trying to top the extremities of other contemporary bands around the year or they likely pushed themselves into it. This album hasn't been as impacting as their debut in the long run or as returnable as that is. This instead went for a more bass-like and barbaric approach and left a few previous aspects behind that kept your attention, or just inclusions that might have still been able to maintain a thought-layered focus. "Carrion" however didn't re-fill enough of that void when those attributes were taken away. This, in turn, feels nearly straight forward as a collective whole: hardly more, hardly less, you pretty much get what you'd imagine it be.

Some of the songs here turn out to be workable, either by building up a certain section with a particular riff or vocal line, or even drumming techniques that come through. So, this has areas that pay off, but more often than not, due to the "static monster" production, you can't distinguish between the instruments with the exception of the vocals being loudest overtop, and even then, they don't always manage to effectively take the reins to compensate. I can recommend this because it still has a certain atmosphere accompanied with hit-and-miss sections, and the version I'm reviewing has the debut and this packaged together on a CD, but you're essentially going to be glued to the speakers with your ear, or quite possibly from afar with your grandfather's borrowed hearing aid jacked up. It is an album that when you put it on, it's going to be for a good chunk of it very similar all the way through and for the most part more of a no-brainer.