Artist: Rotting
Country: Canada
Label: Hell’s Headbangers Records
Formats: LP / CD
Year: 2025
While Hell’s Headbangers is primarily known for its released out of the Black/Death/Thrash Metal pond (preferably a mixture of all that), the people behind the label do have a profound love for the goriest old school Brutal Death Metal as well. From early on the label teamed up with bands like Mortician and Fleshgrind, even combining them on a split LP in 2003, the label’s second ever release. More recently the label also brought some classic Gore Grind/Death Metal releases back to life, among them were the long awaited vinyl treatment of the Hemdale/Exhumed split LP, but also earlier releases by Exhumed, Mortician and Last Days Of Humanity got the splendid and renowned Hell’s Headbangers treatment.
New to that small, but appreciated slew of bands is Rotting. Originally the band’s only full-length album was released back in 1998 on the now defunct United Guttural Records, it had seen a few reissues through various labels previously, but this is the first time the album is also getting its well-deserved vinyl edition. United Guttural stands as one of the most important labels of the late 90’s with many genre-defining releases on its early roster by bands we now all consider classics: Devourment, Skinless, Malignancy, Waco Jesus and Lividity. ‘Crushed’ was the label’s second offering and from all of those early releases actually got the least appreciation and recognition.
Perhaps the album had a lesser impact on the Death Metal scene than that of its aforementioned label mates, but ‘Crushed’ is definitely symbolic of what Brutal Death Metal sounded like at the time. So, besides the musical entertainment still offered from these 10-tracks-in-half-an-hour, there is also a big historical significance embedded in this only album by the Canadian gore-ists.
Let’s start with that, there is enough gore – see the album’s gruesome cover. Rotting offers the same sort of primal Brutal Death Metal that basically finds itself in the middle of bands like early Skinless and Malignancy, with lots of stop-start kind of breaks, brisk tempo changes and the typifying guttural vocals. But it is not all and solely about battering the same path that their peers took, while the guitar sounds still a bit “thin”, in the very same vein that most bands did at the time, it has a sort of crunch that reminds of Fleshcrawl’s ‘Impurity’ (1994) or the post-peak Grave. Hell’s Headbangers states that it sounds more Swedish than Swedish bands around that time and it bears resemblances with classic Grave and Carnage, well… that is a bit of an overstatement, but I get what they are trying to point out here.
‘Crushed’ might not be the ultimate classic out of that underappreciated scene from back in the day, but it certainly stood the test of time flawlessly. Like previously stated, this album harbors a certain historical importance as it shows where lots of bands that were going for the bigger audiences and would sign to labels such as Relapse Records got their inspiration from.
