Bodybits

Putrefied is a death metal band from Holland with former Gutwrench members. I originally received this EP in the form of a demo from Edwin (The Underground Collection) in 2001. He told me that he was in the band for a short period and even wrote some of the music, but they never gave him any credit in the liner notes! Whether this is true or not, I don't know. What's important here is the music, and Putrefied play some heavy downtuned death metal in the US school.

If I didn't know who these guys were, I could swear they are natives of New York. You can hear very obvious influences from Suffocation, Baphomet and Morpheus (Descends) on this EP. In fact, there's a little bit too many of those trademark NYDM 'moshy' riffs for my taste, but I tried to focus more of my attention on the darker, heavy riffing that you can actually headbang too. Putrefied do a good job of providing more of the latter.

Production wise (at least on the demo version), it could be better. I don't like the way the drums sound at all. They are too high in the mix but feel very lifeless, while the guitar and bass take second stage. Speaking of the guitars, they are nicely downtuned but for some reason they still sound a little thin for these ears. I don't know if they only had one guitarist for this release, but it sure sounds like it. The bass is the only instrument that I think sounds great. It's layed down thick and always packs a hard punch. As for the vocalist, he sounds very typical and you can't understand a single word that comes out of his mouth (not necessarily a bad thing for me, but others may care). The good reverb used on his vocals is probably the only redeeming quality here.

Putrefied offer 5 slabs of NYDM on this EP, along with an untitled instrumental outro.
"Insection" and "Invocation" are the most promising songs here, with the former being one of the slower (and heavier) compositions out of the 5. The untitled outro is really killer! It reminds me very much of the song "Unbeknownst" by Rottrevore which was also used as a type of instrumental outro on their full-length CD. It worked well for Rottrevore and I have to say that it did the same for Putrefied.

"Bodybits" is worth owning simply because you don't often hear a Dutch band playing this type of death metal. As I understand, the band has since released some other material. As long as they are able to fix the production issues and add some originality to the music, then I would definitely be interested in hearing more from these guys.