Re-Animated Dead Flesh

Mortician is a band that isn’t really a band. If you want completely brainless Death Metal… this is for you. If you take things seriously, you’ll hate this album. That’s all there is to it. However, if you want some death to listen to, I suppose this could tide you over. Depending on your personality.

Well, this album does have positive points. The intros to most of the songs are funny and will make you laugh, and the cover art is pretty good. That’s about it. This band has no song structure, no interesting riffs, or song ideas. Yet, it’s still somewhat enjoyable. It’s more comedic than brutal. Will Rahmer’s vocals are pretty much horrible. He grunts and bellows with no effort and it’s almost annoying to an extent. His bass playing sounds like one big long fart thought the entire record and drowns everything else out. A machine plays the drums, which isn’t really surprising. If I was the drummer I’d get bored of playing the same stuff over and over, which is what happens. One word can be used to describe this album: repetitive. Plain and simple. It’s tough to pick songs out of this basket, because they’re essentially all the same really. You’ll find yourself scratching your head wondering why you’re still listening to it.

However, some may find pleasure when listening to this. Sure none of this seems to be taken seriously, but it’s fast and heavy. Which is what death metal fan searches for. Get it if you’re a fan of death and don’t care about repetition, otherwise, stay away. Far away.

I still don’t know if Mortician is a band that makes me laugh or puke. Actually, if they can be considered a small part of gore/grind history, it’s not obligatory for them to have released good efforts. Entering the Mortician’s world can be very dangerous because if someone doesn’t know the genre he can remain shocked and for the ones who already know this band, everything seems old and tired. Their extremism doesn’t frighten anyone and their ultra heavy “music” is just a simple output of sick minds in search of disembowelments and fresh meats.

Thanks to Mortician, the imaginary of the ugly, blood covered and brutal metalhead reaches the top in stupidity. Their continued will to pay tribute to horror movies and mutilation has brought them to release several efforts in their career and someone is still able to produce them instead of looking around to younger and more talented bands. Mortician is just two sick guys that play noise and they try to mock us, labelling this crap as metal or, even worse, music. It’s shit and you can do lots of things with the shit…they try to make us eat it and say it’s god but it is not.

Re-animated Dead Flesh is just another big churn of idiotic, violent, excessive contents for a band that should be dead forever. His style is ridiculous and suffers from a continue musical immobilise, with all those intros by horror movies and that incredibly down-tuned instruments. The bass sounds like the guitars for distortion and the drum machine is on continuing blast beats. By the way, at least on the more recent releases, the production is a bit clearer than in the past but we always remain stuck in the same purulent mud.

The down tempo parts are full of gore, hyper distorted riffs and we cannot forget some credits for the totally aseptic, lifeless growl. The style is more than common; it’s without personality and will to be a bit various. For example, “Return to the Grave” song features the fantastic idea of mixing groovy riffs with blast beats in order to create a senseless mixture of abominations, like if the intro wasn’t enough. It’s unbelievable how can someone could worship this shit and stand these 40 minutes of random collection of perversions, sufferings and mutilations.

This is another simple soundtrack for serial killers…well, probably most of the serial killers despise this genre too because they are intelligent. Let’s say this is for psychopaths in general and I’m not one of them. I believe I’ve still “normal” tastes and opinions. Well, at least it made me laugh in some moments…is it normal or am I becoming a part of them?? NOOOO!!!!

Low-budget horror films have served as a lyrical inspiration for Grindcore and Death Metal music since their very beginnings; these aggressive aesthetics with inherent shock-value found an obvious parallel with the zombie and splatter flicks that represented extremism in the seventh art. Unfortunately, this alliance with trash movies made an extensive disservice to both genres and their hybrids, a stigma that prevails today with battalions of uncreative artists.

Rare stand outs, like the pioneers Repulsion and newcomers Lord Gore have managed to be effective while adopting the generic gore imagery from 80's underproduced horror cinema. The majority, however, lies in the torment of mediocrity and suboptimal musicianship.

The use of samples from the aforementioned films in the introduction of album tracks, a common artifice from many artists, bears two important consequences: first, it creates expectation for a climax that must be fulfilled at some point in the song and second, it demands continuity of the theme presented.

Mortician uninterruptedly fails at both predictions during this full-length; there is negligible evolution, only self-evident stasis. Several factors are responsible for the suppression of development and complete exhaustion of all creative resources after the first fifteen tracks, if not earlier; very elementary song structure, providing no differential emotional influence, irritatingly short song spans, which amassed with a recurrent rather slow pace during a significant part of the music renders acts like "Mass Destruction" into wasted album time. The messy and badly mixed production creates a constant background noise which does not add atmospherical grittiness but exposes amateurism and lack of professional commitment. The robotic and artificial drum machine and inexpressive, dull grunts go wrong as well, providing no variety enhancement, also nonexistent in the effortless and ingenuous lyrics about violent concepts.

A few semi-interesting heavy riffs are momentarily noticeable in the first dozen tracks, achieving a certain degree of rhythmic attention, as in "Human Beasts". Several intros themselves are capable of arousing initial curiosity and eerie feelings; the big picture, however, is that the audio samples that represent roughly 25% of the full-length, which is quite substantial, are the intellectual product of others. A potential impression from this analysis is that Mortician tricks theirs listeners to believe their musical work is successful due to this external effort, since the emotions projected by the intros have no relation with the musicians who adopted them.

The final result is not frightening; the audible unpleasantness derives from musical mediocrity, not cinematographic horror. It's a compendium of overused and fruitless simplicity, and an attack on the integrity of the NYDM scene.