Penitence

Organic Infest’s debut album is one atrociously ugly record. It’s raw, mean-spirited, and hideous but oddly enjoyable in a way. The band delivers an outpouring of eight vomit-inducing tracks guaranteed to scare off any trendy ears. Despite that, Penitence is perhaps one of the most bizarre old-school death metal albums I’ve encountered lately, partly due to its production. The guitars are incredibly quiet, while the drums and vocals are mixed in way upfront, thus creating a strange ambivalence of sorts. The drums are also very wooden; almost sounding as if the drummer resorted to use a cardboard box or something. The vocals, as with the drums, sound unnaturally loud. Everything seems right in place in the mix except for the guitars, which funnily sounds like a distant mosquito hovering around.


Adding to the weirdness again, is the outright ridiculous cover. It appears as if Seagrave decided to pay tribute to some defunct Nickelodeon cartoon or something. Apart from that, the music here is dirty, primal old-school death Metal. Stylistically speaking, the band delivers mid-paced, chugging riffs in the finest Grave tradition interspersed with sudden blasts of uncontrolled spite. Penitence kind of resembles the worst aspects of Suffocation, Cannibal Corpse and Grave combined into one uniform sound. The guitars sound very oppressive, constantly grinding the listener’s brain into a soupy pile of mush. There’s also frequent pinch harmonics and other abstract guitar riffs making the experience all the more disorienting. One of the coolest aspects of the album though, is Juan’s drumming patterns. His method is intensely rhythmic and unpredictable, from rumbling double bass to full-out blasting. He also has a tendency to pull off some appropriate fills once in a while.


The vocals are clearly the biggest focus here, with Chegui howling, screaming and grumbling at any given second. I personally think his performance is very commendable here, as he sounds like a truly deranged person. It definitely adds a touch of insanity to the whole picture. While the band didn’t hit their full stride when it came to producing truly uncompromising death metal, they definitely knew how to create ugly, horrible music, and I mean that in the best way possible. Penitence is not for everyone, especially those picky for a good production. The best way to describe the feel of this album is dirty. Its amateurish and filthy but at the same time compelling and unpredictable.

Organic Infest hail from Puerto Rico, and were a true blue underground death metal band. They amassed a decent reputation on the demo tape circuit, but had the miserable fortune to sign with the abysmal JL America label. This usually resulted in a either a very underproduced and badly packaged album from a good band, or merely the signing of crappy, underserving ones. Other good death metal acts like Morpheus Descends and Mortuary suffered at the hands of this inept crew, and Osmose records actually had a US distro death with them early on! Thus it would be unfair to judge Organic Infest too harshly, although this debut is pretty weak. First off I can't even understand what the sleeve illustration is supposed to be, looking like a middle scholl student trie to draw a bunch of icky evil stuff and color it with day-glo colors. Atrocious. The band's sound is much like early Grave, being not too fast on the tempos but full of chunky, mid-tempo and almost doomy guitar riffs. The problem is that the productions is terrible, leaving only the drums clear and the vocals (which are pretty good) pushed way up front. The guitar sound is muffled and weak, which is a shame because it may be the best element of the band's sonic picture. The bass sound however is very clean and annoyingly out of step with the gruff guitar. Some great riffs do appear, as with "Carnal Waste," it's just very hard to discern them. I think that with better sound and a shred or two of greater individuality, had core death metallers might look back on this effort with some affection. As it is, this is just another reminder of how many crappy labels eager to jump on the death metal boom of the earliy nineties ruined many a promising band, and clogged up the scene with so many losers. I haven't heard Organic Infest's more recently issued follow up, but I can only imagine that it's better than this fairly abortive attempt.