Artist: Mortician
Country: USA
Label: Mortician Records
Formats: CD
Year: 2004
It might be a little late, but when I got this CD in the mail the other day I thought it still deserved a review at our beloved magazine. So here it is, “Re-Animated Dead Flesh”, it has been released a couple of months ago through their own record label Mortician Records (no, not Primitive Recordings) and Crash Music Inc. and therefore this is a new era for the band, away from Relapse Records. This first full-length marks a new start for Mortician, though the previous release was a live CD already on their own label and the split LP with Fleshgrinder on Hell’s Headbangers, but it is of course most likely not the case that the band changed a lot musically?
And no, though Will Rahmer told me in 2003 that this album was already done and written in only five days and it would be the most brutal shit they ever made it took them around one and a half year to come up with it and when it comes to the music it is rather unsurprising that nothing happened to their winning formula. This is just such a typical love-them-or-hate-them band, and I belong to the first group, for sure. I love their utter awkward and rather clumsy way of riffing their selves slowly through their set of songs for another record. But it is undeniable, by friend or foe, that the band has got some sheer brutality and some of the better riffs in the most brutal veins of death metal. The most heard kind of criticism will most likely be all those intros (or, in the end, I heard it all, too low bass line, bad vocals, too short songs and on and on goes the list?) but these guys will again be disappointed, big time. All of the, to you, annoying elements are simply there in all its beauty. But that is practically why I like Mortician so much, the mid-tempo grooving passages alternated by the fast drums (indeed, still a drum-machine) and the vocals of Will Rahmer, ever deep and ever sick. It is difficult to pick out a favourite track or just a few of my favourite picks for again there are about twenty-two tracks which are not too different from each other, but it has to be said that I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of this disc. Somehow the years of experience is playing a positive role for the two brutal blood brothers, somehow this album sounds better than “Darkest Days Of Horror”, the band’s last full-length album from 2003.
