Facebreaker - Dead, Rotten And Hungry

Before we start can we all just take a moment to bask in that truly awful album art? Why did the zombie guy take the time to keep his pants on? Oh, the mirth! Maybe one day when I'm old and dying alone in sheer misery I will make an archive of awful record covers to stave off depression and an early suicide. But anyway, as usual, I have digressed...

Thankfully the music isn't as nearly as fucking dreadful as the image chosen to represent it. Dead, Rotten And Hungry is a punishing lesson in mixing Entombedcore with modern death metal; heavier than a sack of dark-matter-coated iron bolts, yet crisper than a slap to the face whilst in Siberia, in the middle of January. The band also draw subtly from slightly more melodic strains of metal, and even the stylings and structures present in something altogether more deathcore. An interesting mix!

Waking The Cadaver - Perverse Recollections Of A Necromangler

I keep forgetting how much I love this album. Waking The Cadaver seems to be a household name in terrible music, and mentioning to almost any metalhead that you like them usually results in laughs, but for anyone who actually listened a bit further than that Shredded Wheat song ("Chased Through The Woods By A Rapist" is the correct title, which is much more grim) would have discovered an absolute gem of a metal record. Perverse Recollections... is jammed awkwardly between the worlds of deathcore, slam and even goregrind (think piccolo snares and watery vocals), and what a glorious fucking mess it is.

This shit is literally all over the place. The drums, in the fast bits at least, are nothing short of spastic. The guitars are razor-wire sharp, twisting and chugging through the tracks like barbed wire twisted around a fence. The vocals are a hydra-headed beast of different styles of grotesquery; drowning in bong water one minute, disemboweling a pig the next, and then barking at you like the frontman of a straight-edge hardcore band, before some amphibian-like creature emerges from Cthulhu's depths to spit a couple of lines too.

Some kind and conscientious soul has uploaded this entire record to Youtube, so tuck in and throw down, gorehounds! 

Annotations of an Autopsy - Before the Throne of Infection

Despite the constant hate towards this band from the "real" and "true" corners of the death metal community, Annotations of an Autopsy seem to have, over the years, done quite well for themselves in outliving the deathcore trend and showing that they are more than just a flash in the pan. This album might have been out on the fairly trendy-underground Siege of Amida but they have gone on to have stuff released on Nuclear Blast; a big name in metal music.

Being a lot more polished than their initial EP, we see a whole new side to Annotations on their debut album, Before the Throne of Infection. It is only album number one and already the deathcore stylings are falling to the wayside; nostalgia of that era exists in a re-recording of the song "Welcome to Sludge City" (renamed here simply "Sludge City"), and the odd gang-chorus still sneaks in every now and then, but for the most part what we get here is a somewhat commercialized spin on the slamming / brutal death metal template. Does that mean there are no more twats with silly sideways haircuts out there walking around with hoodies that read "Stay Sludge" on the top, without knowing what the fuck sludge actually is? Good.

The clean guitar passages are frankly pointless, but songs such as "Fisted To The Point Of Regurgitation" and "Prosthetic Erection" deserve a place amongst the death metal elite. It's just a shame the hardcore death metal community will never let them in.

*PS s'cuse the shitty clipped disc art on this one!