Every strand of hair upon your balding head flies off like poisonous bamboo darts, erupting from the empty hair follicles are thousands of maggots, half exposed and flailing upon the crown of your skull, as if you’ve evolved into some kind of pale larva-headed Medusa. The weight of a cascading wall of vomit bears down upon you, like a stomach acid fueled Iguazu Falls. The next minute, you find yourself treading-water within a pool of blackened-green skin fragments and bile. A debut EP from Gangrenated, a new gore applauding Death Metal duo from Tallinn, Estonia, has arisen from within a reeky swamp of liquified rotting rat carcasses.
Running just shy of sixteen minutes, this EP, which is entitled ‘Demise Profanation’, is a grindy, low, hefty chainsaw slicing batch of carnage. The first track ‘Flayed in the Lathe’ explodes like a pressurised canister of rectum gas with shadowy and massively thick guitars, gargled drown-sounding vocal work, and the sort of frantic low-fidelity drums that sound as if they were being performed inside of a garden shed. The following track ‘Harvest of the Larvae-Ridden (The Carrion Genesis)’, is a fun, catchy beast. I enjoy the highly headbangable guitar performances and the track’s numerous engaging riff switch-ups. The title track is a particularly claustrophobic cut, I enjoy the rolling bass drums and the chug-centered riff ideas, as well as more of the gargling vocal embellishments, overall the song feels intentionally woozy, stomach-churning and noxious. The band closes out the EP with a cover of Mortician’s ‘Zombie Apocalypse’, the style of the track is a very good match for Gangrenated’s own grindy sound, and the band sounds crushing as all hell.
Rather than being just another uninspired offering of typical HM2-style distorted murk, Gangrenated has delivered a very fun little EP here. I like how easy it is to revel within the joy of the simplistic gory nature of this release. All of the instrumentation is handled well, and it’ll be interesting to see what else this bodily fluid-loving duo has to offer down the line. For fans of Undergang, Mortician, Coffin Mulch, and Corpus Offal.
