Bruce Dickinson and his solo band will return to the stage next year for a series of highly anticipated headlining concerts and festival appearances across Europe, under the mysterious title PsychoGod. These shows—spanning the summer and fall—will be Dickinson’s first solo concerts since he wrapped up his critically acclaimed The Mandrake Project Tour in Brazil… Continue Reading →
Album Review: Vomitorial Corpulence – Martyrdomical Symphonanthem
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Christian goregrind. There’s a combination of words I hadn’t expected to use. Then again, the good book isn’t exactly free of bloodshed, so perhaps it makes more sense than I might initially have thought. Further, if you like the repulsive, scuzzy charms of early goregrind (think of the first Last Days of Humanity, Regurgitate or Dead Infection releases) and haven’t given Vomitorial Corpulence’s own “Karrionic Hacktician” or “Skin Stripper” a try then you are sorely missing out. So, my prejudices firmly checked and my humble pie devoured, how fares this new spewing of holy terror?
Another thing that might give you a second of pause: this is over an hour long. In grind terms that’s War and Peace length. That’s one thing in a compilation release – “Grind Finale” by Nasum for example – but for a single, cohesive album it’s…longer than one might suppose for this genre. But I don’t tire of rancid blastfests. We begin the operation by slicing Carcass’ 1989 deathgrind bible “Symphonies of Sickness” into bitesize chunks. We mix in a delirious concoction of apex slayer and OSDM riffs that surge out your headphones possessed with the urge to flatten your skull between them. Yet hold – there’s mischief afoot, and it conspires to get between me and what would otherwise be one of the best things I’ve heard this year. Production styles vary across the album, with songs being muddier or conversely clearer throughout the full tracklist. That’s not unknown among grind releases – probably the most famous example being Napalm Death’s “Scum” having two very distinctly different sides – but generally that comes down to a case of demos or EPs being sandwiched into a single release. “Scum” has two different lineups and tunings over those sides. “Karrionic Hacktician” jams different releases into one whole. This new album though just seems to sporadically favour alternative production styles in a way that does hamper the flow of it overall. Also the guitar tone is…odd. there’s a curiously MIDI sound to it most noticeable in some of the (genuinely awesome) solo sections – take “Polycarp Stabbed to Death” where the band turns into Necrophagist for example; I’m not suggesting that the band programmed the guitars in, but there’s something uncomfortably artificial sounding about it that I’m struggling to define but that you might notice as well. If it is all authentically performed, then – wow. Mastermind Paul Green is a grindmeister of rare ability, firing out technical guitar work that you almost never see in goregrind.
A lot of these songs start the same way – a descending guitar slide into a chug riff isolated on one guitar. That said, there’s no arguing with some of the work here – the opening to “Bedrack Torture Dismemberment” is almost absurdly badass, a solo screeching above a plunging groove before it jackknifes into the chuggiest Repulsion “Black Breath” worship riffs known to man. Tracks belch out unimpeachable ferocity – “Slewed Ezekiel” a monstrosity of drooling groove, “Beastial Devourment” a pinch harmonic laden rampage across the torture floor. 41 tracks, an hour of material, and every sanguineous slice drenches you in a fevered deluge of grind perfection. Qualms aside for a moment, in terms of construction alone, Paul Green understands this music to the degree of a savant. Which only adds to the frustration when, say, “Barnabas Dragged & Burned” just… cuts out right at the end about a second or so before it feels as though it should. There are so many quibbles about this release that hamstring it. Frustration blooms; one minute I was headbanging hard enough to give myself a brain haemorrhage the next something, unbidden and unwelcome, handsprings into view to confound how much I was otherwise enjoying every moment of it. “Passio Sanctarum…” is a magisterial chunk of tech-grind bellicosity, but its production is noticeably different from “Brutal Stoning Death Execution”, which seems to have either a much quieter guitar track or much louder drums. For the life of me I don’t understand why.
It all adds up to an album I’m really enjoying conceptually and compositionally while leaving me a bit confused in terms of execution. The inconsistent production and overly consistent approach to song openings (seriously, just flick through each song individually and see how many start with that descending slide – it’s constant) stymie otherwise excellent material and transform a triumphal return of a scene veteran into a quizzical mix of brilliance and befuddlement. If I’m assuredly a convert to grinding for Christ, there’s nonetheless abundant avenues for improvement that, if followed, would allow VC to shine with the glory they’re clearly capable of.
Metallica’s Kirk Hammett has helped usher in Halloween by reading The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe.
On Tuesday (October 27), San Francisco’s thrash metal giants got their lead guitarist and resident horror hound to chill fans with the 1845 poem, long a staple of Gothic literature, soundtracked by the song Inamorata from their 2023 album 72 Seasons. Watch below.
Hammett has made no secret of his lifelong love for horror. He has an array of ESP KH-2 guitars decorated to feature iconic scary film figures, with respective models depicting Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula and Elsa Lanchester as The Bride in Bride Of Frankenstein.
Another model is designed to resemble a Ouija board: a fixture of horror films since one was used to inadvertently summon the demon Pazuzu in the 1973 classic The Exorcist.
In addition, Hammett, 63, hosted the horror convention Kirk Von Hammett’s Fear FestEvil from 2014 to 2015. The events featured live performances, signings and panels all rooted in the guitarist’s passion for the spooky.
During a 2022 interview with Gibson Guitars, Hammett spoke about how 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre “truly” frightened him growing up.
“There was a buzz on the street and everyone was talking about it,” he said. “I remember going to see it and truly being frightened because there hadn’t been a film like that up to that point that was so graphic and violent in its brutality. There wasn’t anything like that. I remember me and my friends leaving the theatre shaking our heads going, ‘Wow’, and looking at each other wondering, ‘Did we just see that?!’ It was a real experience.”
He also spoke about The Exorcist, explaining how it affected him as a Catholic kid: “I thought the perpetrators of that film were coming after me next,” he said. “It was an honest fear when we were kids. For the next four months I slept with the lights on every single night.”
Hammett joined Metallica in 1983, shortly before the recording of their 1983 debut album Kill ’Em All, and has been with the band ever since. One of the biggest acts in heavy metal, they’ve sold more than 150 million albums worldwide and won 10 Grammy Awards.
The four-piece are currently putting on a residency at Las Vegas multimedia venue the Sphere, scheduled to continue on Thursday (October 29), then on Halloween night itself on Saturday. Whether Hammett will dress up to mark the occasion remains to be seen.
(written by Islander) In last Sunday’s edition of this column I only wrote about one album (by Glorior Belli). It deserved the exclusive attention, but I had planned to write about more releases until some life events got in the way. With today’s album premiere being handled by Daniel Barkasi, I decided to use my […]
