Lmst

By Steel Druhm

Looks like Steel is in the infectious bacteria cultures again! And what do I find among the stained petri dishes but Sweden’s Filth. This upstart death crew may be young, but their style is old and decayed. Forsaking the formulas fatal to the flesh preferred by most Swedish acts (AKA DisEntombed shenanigans), the sound of their Time to Rot debut is all about slime-sucking morgue lickers like Incantation, Autopsy, and Disma. That brings it closer to Rotpit than any Left Hand Path you might make a wrong turn on. What Filth offer is scabby, cavernous hellscapes with beastial caveman riff violence oozing over all your weeping sores and into your maggot-infested ear sockets. This is why you came here, right?

Filth introduce themselves in savage fashion on opener “Odious Obsession.” This is the obvious album highlight and demonstrates why you need to worry about what Filth can do. It’s a swampy death chestnut with mucilaginous, basement-level vocals, punctuated by ridiculously fat, beefy power chugs that shake your foundations and loosen your bowels. There’s a goodly similarity to Rotpit, but all the infamous sleaze merchants of yore are honored in these grotesque body mulching sounds. This is what I need MOAR of, so pump this diseased cadaver goo right into my veins. The title track is less aggressive and more about a creeping, crawling mid-tempo slither with mucous-encrusted riff tendril slapping all within reach. There are also some wonderfully eerie, ice-cold, and atmospheric leads to make you feel alone and uneasy. It’s a bit too long in the snaggle tooth, but it’s effectively riffy, rotten, and rancid. “Live in Agony, Die in Pain” is also quite fierce, blasting and thrashing your ass into the dust before transitioning to shambling power grooves and then bringing out the doom hammer for some Incantation-esque dour dirgery. It’s all over the damn map tempo-wise, but it hangs together.

Unfortunately for Filth, when you offer up a short, under 30-minute debut, the songs need to hit above their weight to leave a bone impression. While nothing on Time to Rot could be considered bad, several tracks fall in that nebulous decent-to-good slot where there are cool pieces, but also some generic recycling of things you’ve heard many times before. I think “Flesh Dress” is entertaining, but it isn’t the kind of track I’ll be dumping onto playlists or forcing Madam X to endure on repeat. Closer “Emaciated” is another tune that has the goods at certain moments, but ends up feeling a bit standard issue when all is said and dead. This leaves Time to Rot with definite highs and a few middle-of-the-roaders with a semi-flat tire. I like what Filth are doing quite a bit, I just need them to operate closer to the level heard on “Odious Obsession” to really stand out from the cavern crowd. At a slim 29 minutes, you expect 6-7 bangers that stick to the roof of the skull, and the bulk of these creepers just miss that level of shitfun.

Riff-wise, Sebastian and Ismael come to kill and bring a respectable collection of nasty bits to the autopsy. The leads often feel like a slithering abomination from an H.P. Lovecraft pulper, and there are some effective efforts to pattern harmonies and solos on old-time horror movie soundtracks. That said, the concrete deforming power stomps on “Odious Obsession” are tough to top and you keep waiting for more of them as the album shambles along. Per handles both vocals and drums, and does a fine job at both. His death vocalizations are appropriately inhuman and seem to be emerging from some unholy crevice in the earth, and he’s scummy enough to sell the material properly. The talent is there for Filth, they just need to elevate the songcraft a few notches to get deeper into the body cavity.

Time to Rot is a brutish opening salvo by a young act with potential. It’s not always in high gear, but when it is, you’ll be impressed. The fact that even the lesser cuts still have enough gnarly to keep you from skipping them is a positive, and I don’t think Filth are too far off from taking the next step toward badass ass-kickery. I’m rooting for them to get even more filthy next time. I like it real dirty, baby.

Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Rotted Life
Website: mesacounojo.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: July 18th, 2025

#2025 #30 #Autopsy #DeathMetal #Disma #Filth #Incantation #Jul25 #Review #Reviews #Rotpit #RottedLifeRecords #SwedishMetal #TimeToRot

Record(s) o’ the Month – June 2024

By Angry Metal Guy

As the summer sun scorched the earth, June delivered a cornucopia of crushing riffs, haunting melodies, and enough blast beats to rattle even the most hardened skulls.1 But finally, the time for the Record(s) o’ the Month for June has arrived! We understand there’s a certain impatience surrounding this, but to give you a peek behind the curtain here, the writers at AngryMetalGuy.com take great pride in the albums they reviewed being the Record o’ the Month. Thus, it’s important that we not hand out the award willy-nilly because we feel the writers should not be too easily rewarded. Such ease and timeliness make writers weak. And, you might be unaware of this, we aim to develop super reviewers; a class of reviewers with opinions and analyses so potent that your taste receptors will dance and sing upon checking out our recommendations.2

Long story short, these things take time. So, confidential details of our absolutely-IRB-approved-research aside,3 June turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable month with a couple of albums that I had trouble leaving off the list. But the top slot? You almost certainly should’ve guessed it. So, without further ado (and before impatience metastasizes into a tantrum4), we present you the Record(s) o’ the Month for June of 2024.

Enjoy the flame war and list-making competition!5

Calling Ulcerate anything other than the world’s premiere modern death metal act would be a mistake. Unlike some bands, whose meteoric rise makes them feel overhyped, Ulcerate has slowly and steadily gained steam since their debut in 2008. Having been a fan since 2009’s iconic Everything Is Fire, it has been exciting to follow their trajectory from a dissodeath band appreciated by the Trve Connoissevr to every release being one of the year’s most anticipated albums.6 Over time, Ulcerate’s sound has continued to develop, and that evolution has increasingly distinguished them from the pack. Cutting the Throat of God [purchase on Bandcamp], which was released June 14th from Debemur Morti Productions, is a powerful continuation of their journey, achieving a perfect balance between the dissonant intensity that defines their earlier work and a newfound melodic sensibility that adds depth (and more importantly, contrast) without sacrificing brutality. This album doesn’t just revisit the themes of existential dread and philosophical inquiry that Ulcerate has always explored; it deepens them, bringing a profound sense of urgency and emotional weight to their music. The atmosphere is suffocating, yet there’s a sense of catharsis in the sheer ferocity and precision of their compositions. As Thus Spoke gushed with glee, “Ulcerate’s greatest manifestations of existentially anguished, veil-tearing truth and ambitious composition” are contained within Cutting the Throat of God, making it perhaps the most profound work to date.

Runner(s) Up:

Crypt Sermon // The Stygian Rose [June 14th, 2024 | Dark Descent | Bandcamp] — In a year devoid of quality doom, Philly’s classic doom mongers Crypt Sermon brotherly shoved themselves into the spotlight with their third opus The Stygian Rose. With the Candlemassive sound heard on their past records intact, Crypt Sermon loads in scads of traditional metal elements and flirts with more extreme elements as they put on an atmospheric doom composition clinic. The band continued to refine, and master, a perfect blend of crushing doom riffs and soaring, majestic melodies that evoke a powerful atmosphere. The Stygian Rose is bolstered by a commanding vocal performance, that when paired with the band’s intricate, and heavy, compositions, raises the bar for the genre. As Steel Druhm enthusiastically exclaimed, “If this isn’t the doom album of 2024, someone made a merger deal with the Devil.“

Noxis // Violence Inherent in the System [June 28th, 2024 | Rotted Life Records | Bandcamp] — If I’m honest, I couldn’t take this record seriously at first because it’s named after the thing that a certain anarchosyndicalist is yelling as he’s forcibly grabbed by Arthur, King of the Britons7 in one of Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s most iconic scenes.8 Yet, Kenstrosity and I have an uncomfortable level of overlap musically—when he’s able to contain his enthusiasm for bad things—and so I decided to give Noxis the ol’ College Try. Fortunately for Noxis, and the readers here, the ol’ “College Try” means something different when you have a PhD. Thus, I dug deep into the Violence Inherent in the System and quickly realized that I had chosen wisely. Not only does Noxis play a delightfully energetic form of death metal that doesn’t feel like a direct homage to any scene or band, but Violence Inherent in the System is well-produced fun, and it contains the first ever—as far as I’m aware also the only—bassoon solo on a death metal record. What have we ever done to deserve the bounty of the scene?

#2024 #Blog #Candlemass #CryptSermon #CuttingTheThroatOfGod #DarkDescentRecords #EverythingIsFire #Jun24 #Noxis #RecordOTheMonth #RecordOTheMoth #RecordSOTheMonth #RottedLifeRecords #TheStygianRose #Ulcerate #ViolenceInherentInTheSystem

Atlanta death metal band Cemetery Filth press into their second decade with a new EP, Senses Of Detriment. Review at FFMB, https://flyingfiddlesticks.com/2024/08/15/cemetery-filth-senses-of-detriment-rotted-life-2024/ #heavymetal #rock #hardrock #deathmetal #CemeteryFilth #RottedLifeRecords #Atlanta

Cleveland death metal band Noxis release their first full-length album, Violence Inherent In The System. Review at FFMB, https://flyingfiddlesticks.com/2024/06/25/noxis-violence-inherent-in-the-system-rotted-life-2024/ #metal #heavymetal #rock #hardrock #Cleveland #deathmetal #RottedLifeRecords #DawnbreedRecords

Noxis – Violence Inherent in the System Review

By Kenstrosity

Often I find that picking promo at random is the path to my most surprising finds. The last couple of years saw me picking up returning band after returning band, which over time made me forget the trials and joys of the blind grab—once my primary modus operandi. I missed it dearly these last few months. It is this strange sense of nostalgia that ultimately brought me to Noxis, a young Ohioan death metal quartet with whom I have no experience and for whom I have no preconceptions. It’s a beautiful feeling, coming into a new piece of media as an empty vessel. Now the only question remaining is can Noxis fill me with their debut Violence Inherent in the System?

If Noxis’ noxious and positively groinkled bass tone alone is any indication, the answer is an ecstatic cry of affirmation. Meaty feels like a shallow term for the kind of thick, muscled death metal shoving itself into my pores with all of the ceremony of a jackhammer. Clear inspirations from earlier Immolation, Incantation, and early Cryptopsy make themselves known right away (“Skullcrushing Defilement,” “Replicant Prominence,” “Violence Inherent in the System”), with a more subtle undercurrent of Afterbirth‘s more adventurous, progressive deviations from the norm rising to froth above a blunderbuss of unstoppable riffs and brutal rhythms (“Tense and Forlorn”). Yet, something more bespoke roils in Noxis’ curdled compositions that speaks not only to their fearlessness as songwriters, but also to something kinkier still (“Horns Echo Over Chorazim,” bonus track “Surfin’ Blood Futile”).

At forty-nine minutes of skull-bashing, brain-wrinkling, ugly1 death metal, you’d think Violence Inherent in the System overstays its welcome all too quickly; nothing could be further from the truth. This record rips time away from me like a fugue state. Nevertheless, an improbable number of its riffs and expertly stitched segments lodge themselves in my memory bank. Opening duo “Skullcrushing Defilement” and “Blasphemous Mausoleum for the Wicked” assault every synapse with a cavalcade of stellar grooves, pummeling riffs, and stealthily syncopated measures which together amount to something much greater than the sum of their parts. “Path of Visceral Fears” then allures with a sultry, drunken swagger and Incantationated themes against a deathgrinded beat. Without warning, I’m thrashing my body around like a freshly caught tuna. Then, just when I think I’ve figured Noxis out, that’s when they bring out the big brain moves. Strangeness abounds in an inspired all-out battle royale between a flute, a clarinet, a trumpet, and what I suspect but cannot confirm is a bassoon on SotY contender “Horn Echo Over Chorazim.” Dueling solos between these instruments fly in like bats out of hell after a massive windfall of creative, filthy riffs, and all of them sound like they were played by old-school death metal guitarists. Absolute insanity.

As memorable and striking as so much of Violence Inherent in the System is, Noxis’ brilliant album organization represents the most important aspect of the record’s success, and the one area that could use some attention. Shuffling blistering speed (“Torpid Consumption,” “Violence Inherent in the System”) with mid-paced stomps (“Blasphemous Mausoleum for the Wicked,” “Tense and Forlorn”), and slimy, doom-tinged grinds (“Replicant Prominence,” “Emanations of the Sick”) guarantees an exciting and dynamic experience from beginning to end, with no low lights to speak of. On the other hand, most songs that extend past five-and-a-half minutes could stand a thirty-second trimming. It’s not that they test my patience at any juncture. Rather, tightening them just that much more with small edits and cuts would only further enhance the whole’s overall impact. As a final nitpick, the production, while sporting a near-perfect snare and bass tone, does not suit the woodwind and horn instruments in “Horns Echo Over Chorazim” well. They sit in a strange sonic space that feels at once too far back, too far forward, and not of the same origin as the other instruments—a paradox that I can’t explain scientifically—creating an initially jarring sensation that almost derails what is incontrovertibly a fabulous piece of death metal novelty.

Noxis’ caught a bit of lightning in a bottle with Violence Inherent in the System. Novel, smart, memorable, and absolutely engorged with piss, vinegar, and virility, Violence Inherent in the System continues to wow me with each new spin. I was not expecting something of this quality from a debut by a band I picked out blindly, but here we are. If you don’t get your grubby little filth mits on this, you’re missing out. Big time.

Rating: Great!
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Rotted Life Records
Website: facebook.com/Noxisdeathmetal | noxisdeathmetal.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: June 28th, 2024

#2024 #40 #Afterbirth #AmericanMetal #Cryptopsy #DeathMetal #Immolation #Incantation #Jun24 #Noxis #ProgressiveDeathMetal #Review #Reviews #RottedLifeRecords #ViolenceInherentInTheSystem