[Artwork by Pierre de Palmas]
When revealing Melting Rot as the first band booked to play at Revenge of the Corpse 3, festival organizer Isaac Horne wrote on Instagram that the Aurora, Illinois, trio was “the closest you’ll ever get to seeing Dead Infection live.” Well, OK. One ticket, please.
Melting Rot also, of course, knows what’s up. You can tell the the band is made up of real ones because it tapped the preeminent editor of sonic slaughter, Pierre de Palmas of the wastemaking Braindead Zine, along with the equally gooey bands Vomi Noir and Blue Holocaust, to handle the album art. More subtly, though, Melting Rot dodges one of the style’s irreparable momentum-killers. Infatuation with Premeditation, the band’s full-length follow-up to 2021’s Blood Delusions, opens with a sample from Ken Russell’s suitably bonkers Crimes of Passion. That’s it for the clip reel, the only time you’ll have to pay the Mortician tax. Right, what’s impressive about Infatuation with Premeditation is that it’s free of the typical goregrind fat, the empty calories that the stupider bands, those philosophical cousins of pizza thrash, use to obscure their nothingness. Melting Rot has got something, and that something is a lust for the way bodies move in the meatspace.
Here’s what I mean. Following an introductory march, which is to grind what “Sirius” is to the Chicago Bulls, Melting Rot gets right to ripping. And as it rends flesh, it finds the right balance between blasts and minceier mid-paced chugs, between a beefy drum tone and chewed up guitars, between eagle screams and guttural esophageal emissions. Fundamentally, it’s what you want from a goregrind band on stage.
Indeed, Infatuation with Premeditation sounds like it’s calibrated for the live setting. Most notably, the riffs eschew canoe metal for goregrind classicalism, favoring blunt force trauma directness over fiddliness, the kind of girthy jud that cuts through a crowd’s inbuilt apathy and initiates a human’s sick riff response. That has been the way to get the job done since time immemorial: sick riff make head bang, and the rest will follow.
But really, what will unite the show-going generations and be a siren call to grizzled grinders and balloon kiddies alike is not just the riffs but how Infatuation with Premeditation is structured. Again, it’s impressive how fleetly Melting Rot moves, mainly because it has eliminated dead weight. These 11 songs, clocking in at nearly 18 minutes, have the sleekness of an act that has received plenty of real-world feedback. It’s almost as if the band A/B tested everything in front of a focus mosh, judging the worthiness of blasts by the precise metal metrics of stage rushes and circle pit RPMs.
Acknowledging that the title is a little too on the nose in this context, “Morbid Infatuation” is as good a place as any to start the pit. Featuring a guest spot from Matt Harvey, the song certainly has a ‘simplified Exhumed for the permanently plastered who have a line item in their budget for Obscene Extreme inflatables’ snappiness to it for its first half, provided it was pressed into an Archagathus meat grinder. It does the job-getting-done things: guitarist Brian Koz pumps out a punkishly Impetigo riff, drummer Aaren Pantke fortifies the backbone with titanium snare hits, and singer Ted Soukup goes low with a guttural that could’ve blown Booger away at a belching contest. The blueprint is there. But the giddy joie de giclée that Melting Rot brings to the dissection table just works. That first half feels like a tractor beam for those hunting for bruises, pulling budding stage divers forward toward their airborne demise. And then, once they’ve seen enough kids go ass over teakettle in an effort to recession-proof the backbrace industry, the band is like, “Attention please: Faster.” The blast off is perfectly placed, the kind of race to raging that can melt the mind of even the most ardent arm-crosser standing by the soundboard. The flow of these two parts is like putting a key into the ignition and turning it.
If Infatuation with Premeditation has any knocks, it’s that, as an album experience, it doesn’t offer the most memorable set of songs — no highs or lows, it just goes. Melting Rot has riffs, but it doesn’t have the riff, the kind of world-beater that you can’t wait to have whoop your ass as soon as the record starts spinning. That was Dead Infection’s dealio: the anticipation of that nasty part in “Colitis Ulcerosa” or whatever that still rearranges your face even after 11 million replays. (Spastic Tumor was one of the best newer bands at the sick riff stock-in-trade — RIP.) Infatuation with Premeditation also goes hard, but doesn’t irresponsibly redline to the invigorating extent of, say, Shitgrinder. Still, it’ll probably be one of the most fun goregrind albums you’ll hear this year, and the closest you’ll ever get to maybe leaving your apartment and going to a show. See you at Revenge of the Corpse 3. Don’t touch me.
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