Artist: Carcass
Title: Heartwork
Type: Album
Label: Earache
Year: 1993
MTUK has long been respected for its reviews of all the best current releases, but it has been suggested that what is lacking on these fine pages is a section dedicated, not to new shit, but to those great albums hidden in our collections that we keep going back to. To be fair, it’s the current and forthcoming releases that we cover as it’s important that we tell you, dear reader, what is worth spending your hard earned cash on and the assumption is that unless you are in our younger demographic then you will own most of these old releases anyway. Plus, knowing that our readership is largely of the more worldly-wise than certain other rags, we can get straight to the crux and say its largely a game of advertising, and an album twenty years old hardly needs much of a push. So I suppose this is going to end up being a rather self-indulgent exercise for all involved; a chance for us all to reminisce over memories of how we discovered band X, or foam at the mouth at how amazing album Y is and wait for the “well, actually Z album was better” hate mails to come flying in. Hell, if you can’t lay on ten tons of lyrical wax on the internet where every nutcase and xenophobe has a voice then where can you?
Perhaps my “classic album” story is one that many will not relate to or perhaps I’ll end up surprised. For me, one of the most significant albums has to be Carcass’ 1993 release Heartwork. This album has always divided opinions in the metal world; on one hand it was their major success and the one that really introduced them to the semi-mainstream while grinders who were with the band since the beginning often regard it as their sell-out. Ho hum, I can’t claim I was a major player in the metal scene in the 80’s; being the wrong/right side of 30 (mind your goddamn business!) it would be a blatant fabrication and would lead you all to question the very integrity of this here ‘zine. I actually discovered this album six years later, around the time when the wishy-washy likes of Korn and Coal Chamber dominated the pages of Kerrang! and metal just didn’t seem as edgy as it once was. Everything seemed so plastic. Glossy. Colourful. Everyone had a cleverly manufactured image that sealed the package and made their music sellable to the masses. What happened? This wasn’t what I remembered of my pre-teen days taping Raw Power on a Thursday night. There had to be more to metal than this; something dirtier, rawer, less glossy, less whiny, more brutal…something Kerrang! didn’t want you to find…
Heartwork was the ultimate discovery. The one I needed to turn me on to a whole other world that I previously didn’t know even existed. After hearing the song ‘No Love Lost’ played on a late night music show I stumbled upon the album on a shopping trip to Leeds, which turned out to be the best £12.99 I ever spent! From there I soon worked out there were tons of awesome bands waiting to be discovered that the mainstream press and your average kid my age just wouldn’t touch, even if my meagre funds and lack of super speed internet connection placed a heavy restriction upon the amount of music I could offer my attention to. Perhaps it was that Heartwork was so neatly perched upon the fence that separated the mainstream and the extreme metal underground; it was accessible enough to lure the uninitiated, but extreme enough to retain my interest long after far more underground bands had been unearthed. Today this album sounds incredibly melodic to these ears; one thing that really alienated their core fanbase at the time but to me it’s this intertwining of melody and heaviness that makes this stand up as a death metal masterpiece all these years later.
From the distinctive opening crunch of ‘Buried Dreams’ this grabs you by the proverbial knackers and doesn’t let go until the end. The entire album grinds ahead at a steadily consistent pace you can just about comfortably keep up with, not for a moment running out of steam. Whether the first half, or the second, is better is open to debate but neither one can be far behind the other. There’s the full speed ahead thrashing of ‘This Mortal Coil’ and ‘Carnal Forge’ which whips up a devastating amount of carnage before a nice bit of lead guitar work comes along breaking the speed up preparing to give a slow crushing. The vocals of Jeff Walker are full of venomous rage and with his snarl the lyrics are nearly always distinguishable. The even paced enunciation on ‘Embodiment’ really hammers it home as the way the track is introduced, picking up a slow, grinding chug just seems to break the album up neatly. The lead guitar work throughout just sounds deadly; there’s a classic metal feel almost in there although tuned down a notch. The musicianship is spot on, as is the production. Perhaps for a band that were never meant to be about technical proficiency there’s a certain amount of irony there, and no doubt with the more polished sound they also turned down the lyrical gore and had the once-swallowed medical dictionary surgically removed. The band really peaked with this album and with Swansong they proved it was an album that couldn’t be matched or repeated and probably never will.
Luci Herbert
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