I’ll say this is the type of EP you’d want to blast loud in your garage. Rot Fester do a solid job of making all of the production as grubby and disgusting as it could be and they refuse to tidy anything up. There’s an Autopsy like filth to the sound, especially in the way the sound gets dragged through sludge and doom without losing its bite.
The vocals definitely were what kept me listening mostly. They sit low down in the mix, real muddy and sludge like, and this just sits great against some of the faster tracks on here. You do hear a bit of Thrashy guitar and drumming, and I quite liked the push and pull of the fastness and muck, rather than the whole thing just treading along sluggishly.
The grubbier production adds a lot of character to these riffs. Nothing is too polished or sterile, and even at the speediest moments of the songs, there is a thick coating of dirt that hangs over everything.
And to round it off, the closing track ‘Another Storm Brewing’, switches it up to completely break this into a different mold. You get these background vocals from Camilla Tjernberg to give a nice layer over the other more heavy sound, and the pace slacks off leaving it sounding quite doom like. I like this a hell of a lot too as it actually feels like the end rather than just having just one more track on the EP.
Ultimately, ‘Death Row’ is fast where it counts and has a good layer of muck thrown on top, and it is damn heavy throughout. Rot Fester clearly know their sound, but they chuck in some Thrashy momentum and the weight of the sludge and doom to top it all off to really make it feel like it all comes to together.
