Disembowelment

The black, murky underground buries cesspools of great, influential art, especially in the metal spectrum. There are labels that do nothing but stab bands in the back, leaving them to bleed alone. And then there are band that just fade. Disembowelment was one of those acts. But after being buried under the scope, Relapse Records pulled their reverb drenched art from the bowels of overpriced e-bay vendors. In fact, Relapse took the effort to re-release their entire recorded material.

The first disc includes the one full-length album the Disembowelment spawned: Transcendence Into The Peripheral. Imagine Obituary tuned down to A flat, using three reverb pedals (on each instrument), bpm turned down to 60 (much slower than Obituary’s plodding sections), and with added blastbeats.

Although comparing this to anything is futile. This stands alone.

Woven within the distortion and extreme down tuning is a sense of melody. Throughout the album, there is a reverb drenched (everything is) clean guitar used as a harmonic counterpoint to the abrasive guitars.

Along with large guitars is the looming bass. It blends it with the guitars, but you notice huge amounts of rumbling frequencies that can only spawned from distorted bass guitars.

Another features of this album is Renato Gallina. He produces a somewhat caveman grunt, as the echoes of his voice spread through the album. Like any true death metal vocalist, you’d need this guy to explain every single word. Reading along with the lyric sheet is not helpful either.

Each track is basically a mixture of extremely slow death metal with major doom overtones and grinding, blastbeat happy escapades.

The second disc of this Relapse collection has the “dUSK” demo and a special compilation track. The last five tracks are from “Mourning September”, the band’s first demo. It was recorded utilizing a four track. You can see what the band is trying to accomplish, but they haven’t established that atmosphere that the “dUSK” demo or “TRANSCENdENCE” has.

Final words: Stop reading and go get this.