If memory serves, it was Abscess last album ‘Horrorhammer’ which was the first release on Nocturno Culto’s sub-label for Peaceville, Tyrant Syndicate. For reasons unbeknown, their new album is going to be the last as well, perhaps he is going to be busy stepping up production with Darkthrone and bringing out two albums with them a year, speaking of which it’s been a fair few months since their last one. He is leaving it all on a good festering note though and has drafted Dennis Dread in for the glorious old-school cover art on ‘Dawn Of Inhumanity’ and also provides some guest vocals, but enough about old Nocturno this is after all a review of everyone’s favourite urine junkies.
Abscess should need no real introduction but just in case someone dropped a particularly heavy rock on your head and you just crawled out from under it, the musicians have served time in such well known combos as Death, Autopsy, The Ravenous and Von as well as other less well known entities. Their brand of death is one that can be summed up in words such as ‘crusty’ and ‘fetid’ with elements of death, grind, doom and punk all fighting each other for domination and supremacy. The new album is described as “a deep trip into apocalyptic sickness” and as “hallucinatory,” so in other words you are best off preparing yourself for a veritable headfuck before pressing play.
You simply cannot mess with a song title like ‘Goddess Of Filth And Plague’ which after a sinister slow start suddenly rushes you kicking and screaming. The vocals are scabby and the instrumentation drunkenly slewed and the whole thing demands you go and turn it up to the maximum volume you can endure. With all four of the band members (not forgetting NC somewhere) providing vocals it is like a party of demons squabbling for tasty morsels to devour and gurgling and puking up their feast afterwards. This immediately made more of an impact on me than previous albums I have heard, it perhaps has more of an urgent immediacy about it, in fact it reminds a fair bit of the excellent ‘August Underground’ inspired ‘Blood Delirium’ from The Ravenous. The punk beats are always present, discharged from Chris Reifert’s drumming and the skewered guitar riffing from Clint Bower and Danny Coralles make it all the more scummy.
Songs are actually fairly lengthy and bring the doom to lengthen them at times, they are also downright infectious both in melody and no doubt in disease, check out the puked up rhythm on ‘Never Sane Again’ before it descends into maddening lunatic babbling from the varied deranged vocalists and a slow doomy beat. At times things build up into a deluge of noise as on the incendiary conclusion of ‘The Rotting Land’ but then by comparison the doom laden dirge of ‘Dead Haze’ takes you to the barren plain of the dead. ‘Dark Side Of The Knife’ has probably the catchiest chorus of them all but it spews it out whilst still being totally rotten and rancid, with vocals building into a frenzied yap.
Lasting almost an hour there is plenty of gnarly action going on here and it is one of those albums that for me does not outstay its welcome in the slightest. If all death metal were as good as this I wouldn’t be such a picky bastard and get bored of so many bands so quickly and this has an almost addictive staying power which keeps me wanting to go back to it. If we ever see the promised release of Necrophagia’s ‘Deathtrip 69’ this year then I will have had my sickness quota, if not well I guess I shall just have to keep playing this.
http://www.myspace.com/abscessband
