A decade ago (Jesus Christ...) I tried (and failed) at running my own record label. I have done it again for fun once or twice since, but cutting out tape covers in my house is a bit different from trying to press vinyl and organising massive splits. Anyways, I failed miserably at it, but I did get my hands on some awesome music. This here was a CDr re-issue of an atmospheric Italian death metal demo by the band Dead Twilight that I released before I went into fully-fledged vinyl and CD releasing.
Some of you long time readers may remember these guys from Myspace; their gothic-tinged drum machine death attack stood out to me a country mile over all the usual boring bedroom grindcore that was filling my feeds at the time (remember those Bulletins? Jeez...) . It is only a couple of tracks long, but its a fucking stormer.
This is my first experience with Umigliazione - who play hardcore punk style stuff mashed up with super noisy freak-outs. They play 3 songs here, in 4 minutes or so, and it's definitely not what I expect to hear. I'll have to check these guys out more, as this is very brief.
On the flipside, 2 Minuta Dreka offer up a massive contrast. This is far from the band's later, groovy material. On this 7" we have nothing but pure 7MON-worship; offering up 70 (yes, that's right - 70) tracks in roughly 4 minutes. The "songs" are grinding blasts of scraping bass noise and guitar shreddery on top of the usual smattering of blast beats and distorted vocals.
2 Minuta Dreka self released this under the Grind Block label and it is limited to 1000 copies, so should be fairly easy to get a hold of if you are so inclined (copies are currently 2 Euros on Discogs).
Debridement is (I believe) the third album by Italian goregrind / death metal squad Bowel Stew. Whilst Debridement owes more to brutal death metal than any goregrind record, it manages to maintain that authentic air of dodgy pathological madness that is often lost in the 'brutalism' of much death metal. Bowel Stew is a nasty band, and whilst the cover art might not be a real picture of disgusting gore, you know they mean business with this sound.
Debridement contains 9 tracks, most around the 2 minute mark, although due to the composition style they actually sound a lot longer to me, but perhaps my brain is just geared this way when it comes to death metal. Unfortunately, a lot of underground brutal death ends up sounding like complete mush, but Debridement retains some semblance of clarity in the production job despite the usual murky furore of blasting gore madness.
Probably the best sounding Bowel Stew recording I've come across so far, and well worth a look for fans of both brutal death metal and goregrind.
PS I'd like to apologise for the ridiculously shitty low quality album artwork - Blogger crushes the fucking life out of my uploads and I can't put "risky" stuff like this on my Photobucket account because it gets taken down. All the more reason to move to permanent personal hosting! Stay tuned!
