Corpses...Intense Stench

When I listen to this album that's what I tend to think about think this band was imagining recording these tracks. It just so happens all of those were translated through the death metal machine and filtered out as a series of very brutal, if archaic, sounds.

That's the issue with Impure's Corpses..., it is just very bland and not to do with much else. Even as the album begins and the straight forward double bass pattern rolls on, and then for the rest of the album, you know exactly what is in store for you. Impure could not write a catchy riff to save their lives on this one, but do manage to create enough overwhelming noise to make you forget entirely what you're here for.

That's where guitarist Rafa shines, total noise and confusion. The grindcore label added to them can be defined here, because many of the riffs on this album - despite relatively clear production - are just puddles of indiscernible sludge. "Rotten Contagion" is literally just chords and atonal tremolo lines piled up around each other to create a song, with vocals thrown mercilessly on top of it all. In fact, at this point, the band seems much more akin to deathgrind than anything else and the brutal death tag seems only applicable to the vocals and jilted song structures.

Then there's the vocalist, and well let's just say calling him anything other than a fourth rhythmic device would be giving him too much credit. There is nothing discernible here other than extremely monotonous belching and occasional grunting, and the lyrics are actually worse - the obvious half-knowledge of the English language makes it more funny than terrifying and I can't really tell if that's what the band was going for - though the samples from various Hellraisers and other horror flicks are welcome.

The rhythm section is boring, simple as. The bass is quite audible and sounds almost like a Fender P-bass, but the playing is very follow the leader and the drumming is - as mentioned - very consistent if increasingly dull. Attaching themselves to the bland and uninteresting, the band decides a nice roomy production would do. The only problem with that combined with these scooped guitars and Fender bass sounds is that it carves out a frequency range where the vocals neatly fill in - and then proceed to overpower literally everything else on the record leaving the boring vocals front and center with the at least curious guitar playing going unnoticed.

Pros:

+ Noise riffs in a death metal aesthetic
+ Bass sound is incredibly prominent; very bright
+ Hey, it's only 23 minutes

Cons:

- Vocals and drumming are both dreadfully boring and monotonous
- Production value combined with specific tones leave instruments in the FAR background
- Structure and arrangement thrown out the door in favor of constant noise
- Lyrics are uncomfortably bad, and not in a remotely gory way