Putrescent Clitoral Fermentation

Vulvectomy are from Italy. They play brutal death metal music. And this is their first full-length release. Based on the reviews and ratings, here on Metal-Archives, I thought this record was going to be an exciting listen, based of the other review(s) of this record. But nope...this does not provide anything I really enjoy deeply. I'd say this record is a little "empty". I guess "Post-Abortion Slut Fuck" (2010) is probably their best release...

The band is having some terrible production issues here, too. It's sad. The mixing is alright, but the mastering is fucking horseshit, seriously. It's just dreadful. It might be a little "clean", but it's muddy and foggy for the most part. It's a crying shame...kind of. The vocals are mastered so horribly here. Why was this a good idea? Oh wait, it wasn't. And it shouldn't take an idiot to figure it out.

The guitars, to me, sound weaker than the bass does. The bass is like on a fucking power-trip. It's got to be the "show-off" on this record. It's almost enough to give you a physical headache, honestly. I don't want to hear the "thumps" of a damn bass guitar constantly, it's a bit stupid, really. The guitar is being too groovy, too often. Almost every song is sharing the same bullshit riffs. Though, this album does feature some cool breakdowns and power-based pressure. The guitars are heavily distorted, too. I'd say the band's general guitar work...at best, isn't anything more than "decent".

I happen to think the drums are good. They're a bit quiet in the background. The mastering of this album really had fucking destroyed some of the other musical stems that were recorded. The drums are really "punchy" and "balanced" better than the bass, for sure. Still have the "pop" can sound to them, too. In fact, as a joke, they sound more hollow than an idiot's head. But yeah, realistically the drums were constructed well. The artwork makes the album attractive if you a sick fuck who wants to fuck a bloody asshole (literally). Red is virtually everywhere, just waiting to turn you red!

Lastly, the fucking vocals are so drowned behind the guitar and bass, it's almost not even worth listening to this album, but if you were to listen to it, based on the instrumentals, fine...it's "decently" done. But it's not nearly as "exciting" as "some" of "these" people have lead you to believe. Don't believe me? Continue to read my review and compare mine to all of theirs, then listen to it yourself, you might see why I'm not overly impressed by it after-all. The vocals are far-too-quiet. You might as well not even had them in the mix, period. It's just fucking retarded if you can hardly hear them anyways. Plus, based on what I can hear, it sounds like s different vocal style, you know, regarding a "pig" grunt. The vocalist has done this with every full-length release so far, if that happens to be the case. Whatever, a little boring...only because it wasn't handled with care. Otherwise...decent...and that's all.

I'll admit, despite the fact that Vulvectomy are arguably one of the most notable bands in slam death metal today (hell, they've released three full-lengths, how many slam-oriented BDM bands can say the same?), to this day I'm not super-familiar with them. I mean, I've heard the more famous songs by them at some point, like "Festering Detached Genitals" and stuff, but I've never given the albums proper attention. Don't make the same mistake I did; we're looking right here at possibly one of the best slam death metal albums to ever exist.

It's kind of hard to write about Vulvectomy without inevitably comparing them to Cephalotripsy, but that's less because their musical styles bear actual similarities to each other and more because both bands possess an astonishing understanding of groove. Similar to Uterovaginal Insertion of Extirpated Anomalies, everything about Putrescent Clitoral Fermentation is catchy as fuck. Everything. I guess where this differs from Cephalotripsy is the methods used to reach that groove: Cephalotripsy are a pretty complex outfit as far as slam goes, mixing various odd time signatures and warped slams into the mix. Vulvectomy reach the same ideal but from a totally different perspective, by which I mean to say that this is mouth-breathing, glue-huffing retard slam for complete idiots. It's listening to music like this that keeps enrollment up at special-ed schools.

Now, most slam bands understand what a triplet pattern is and use it occasionally, but Vulvectomy are different. They understand, man. It's like they have synesthesia and see the number 3 everywhere they look, so they decided to write an album about it to help our feeble human brains understand the concept. The triplet patterns on this album are perfectly placed, chunky, precise and ridiculously catchy, so catchy that they threaten to rip open the fabric of space and time and start leaking pure groove from the nether regions. The same happens when the band start playing in 3/4 time signatures - the amount of swinging groove that the music builds up is just completely absurd. But I'm exaggerating a bit about just how many there are here; Vulvectomy also use a lot of straight 4/4 chug assaults and those are just as fantastic, not to mention actually really memorable. I think it's worth noting that this may be one of the few slam death metal bands who can get away with choosing not to use a constant stream of double bass during their slower, slightly more rocking sections. Furthermore, when the band slow down, it usually actually feels like a breakdown instead of just another slam starting up (see around 1:30 of the title track for a good example of this, as well as one of the most ridiculously monstrous moments in the entire history of death metal), which is admirable. It gives the songs a better sense of flow than most slam death bands can usually manage.

The blast beats aren't bad by slam standards, either - pretty beneficial to the music, actually. They're mostly mid-paced and used more for pounding and emphasis than they are for speed, but there are also a couple of those absurdly fast quasi-gravity blast beats with the snare getting whacked on thrice as fast as the cymbals above them. Those, too, are usually played in triplet patterns, or at least 3/4 over a 4/4 guitar track, and it sounds - yep, you guessed it - catchy as fuck.

Another place where Vulvectomy stand out are vocally. I've talked about BDM bands who use their vocalists as percussion instruments before, but I can't really think of a band that that phrase would fit better than it fits Vulvectomy. Diego Fanelli spits out a bunch of frantic, airy gutturals in patterns that fit over the music like a glove. Essentially he picks at random from the set of syllables here:

WEE, DEE, DOO, WOO, URR

...and mixes them together in a way that complements the slams perfectly:

"Wee-dee-doo, urr-doo-urr, wee-doo-woo, dee"
"Wee-doo-woo-doo, dee-doo-urr-doo, wee-wee-urr-doo, dee-woo-urrrrrrr"

It's not a very slurred style of vocals, and the impact of every syllable lies on top of a slam and gives it an added punch. It's about as amazing as it sounds.

All-in-all, the only suggestions I can really give to Putrescent Clitoral Fermentation are that the instrumental sound is just a bit too synthetic for my tastes. The guitars have too much treble and crunch and not enough bass, which kind of makes the melodies fuzzier than they should be; and the drum machine used, while not egregious, is still pretty noticeably crappy. And yet, in a way, I think the trashiness of the instrument sound complements the music perfectly. Vulvectomy are filthy, and trashy, and dumb, and don't make any attempts to hide the fact that their music is designed for people who have fewer IQ points than teeth. This is the kind of quality that reaffirms your interest in the genre as a whole surrounding it, and pretty much every fan of slam death metal needs to hear it at some point.

This is without a doubt some of the dumbest music I've ever heard. Vulvectomy is the Paris Hilton of slam death: they're setting everyone back ten years in progress. This is the most archtypical slam I can think of; really the sort of thing you hear in your mind when you think of 'slam death'. Totally deemphasized blasting sections, massively thick guitar tone, song structures ENTIRELY based around slam riffs, and just about every other typical slam element you can possibly think of. The only thing to slightly set Vulvectomy apart is the presence of a drum machine... which is programmed exactly like any slam death drummer anyway. They've even used slammy samples for each of the drum voices!

All the music here is very typical Devourment/Cephalotripsy/etc. worship, but it's made even more binary than any of those bands. There's nothing in the way of 'evolving' song structures: they just barrel in a totally straight line down these simple tremolo/chunk riffs. Growly gurgles and an oppressively heavy production job do that much more to reduce any concept of 'variation' to somewhere around zero. While listening to 'Putrescent Clitoral Fermentation' you get the impression that the guys in Vulvectomy are slam fans and slam fans only; it's like they haven't heard even a trace of any other style of music or metal, for that matter. It's the distilled essence of the genre into a single album; I guess that's what happens when you start making things within the paradigm of a genre intentionally.

For instance, you notice how all the earliest funeral doom bands like Skepticism and Thergothon don't really sound much at all like the typical funeral doom band today? Well the same thing essentially happened with slam. Devourment and Soils Of Fate don't sound a great deal like Vulvectomy, because slam, like funeral doom, sort of decided for itself what the 'ground floor' of the genre would be. Well Vulvectomy isn't just hugging the ground floor, they actually have a shovel and are digging a hole in it in hopes of getting lower. This music is the anti-Amputated Genitals or Septycal Gorge; other bands are trying to push slam death forward, but Vulvectomy are reveling in every ounce of absolute regression they're able to summon up.

It's helpful, though, that the guys in Vulvectomy really understand how to make good, painfully straightforward slam death. They've done their homework on how to compose a massive slam section, and some of the tremolo riffs actually aren't boring (the typical pitfall of most slam bands). The drum programming is deft and feels natural (apart from the absence of fills) and allows for very natural transitions between blast and groove. While the seams of songwriting between fast and slow are still visible, they're not really awkwardly or thoughtlessly done; the music on this album has a feeling of fine-tuning over a pretty significant period of time. The opposite of, I don't know, Artery Eruption in that respect. Vulvectomy gets stoned AFTER the writing instead of before, I guess.

So while it operates TOTALLY within the traditions of the genre, I really do love this album. It's enormously catchy, fantastic driving music, and skull-crushingly heavy slam death for big fans of the style like myself. This will NOT change the minds of anyone who hates Devourment; this is pure Italian thug slam that's only missing a sideways baseball cap and some lyrics about (non-eviscerated) hoes before it's rap music with heavy guitars. If you love slam, there's no reason you shouldn't own this already! Invent a slam right now, and it's in this album: CHUNCHUNCHUN CHUN, CHUN-CHUN, CHUN-CHUN, CHUN CHUN! It's fun! Start your day the slammy way with Vulvectomy!