positive punk: CARCASS

"reek of putrefaction"

Year: 1987

Country: UK
City: Liverpool

Label: Earache

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 22

Time: 40 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Death Metal

Carcass are an English extreme metal band from Liverpool, which was formed in 1986. The band have gone through several line-up changes, leaving guitarist Bill Steer and bassist and vocalist Jeff Walker as the only constant members. They broke up in 1996, but reformed in 2007 without one of its original members, drummer Ken Owen, due to health reasons. To date, the band have released six studio albums, two compilation albums, four EPs, two demo albums, one video album, and six music videos. Carcass are regarded as pioneers of the goregrind genre. Their early work was also tagged as "splatter death metal", and "hardgore" on account of their morbid lyrics and gruesome album covers. Their fourth album Heartwork (1993) is considered a landmark in the melodic death metal genre. The band's lyrics often focus on animal rights issues. Walker and Steer are both vegetarians. Steer used to be vegan and Walker was a hunt saboteur. Carcass are influenced Metal bands like: Death, Master, Morbid Angel, Macabre, and other acts such as Slayer, King Diamond, Discharge, Mayhem and Diamond Head.

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"symphonies of sickness"
Year: 1989
Label: Earache
Format: CD, LP
Tracks: 10
Time: 40 min.
Genre: rock
Style: Death Metal

If this album had been my introduction to death metal years and years ago, I probably wouldn't have shied away from the genre. Symphonies of Sickness seems to have more of a death metal mentality to the way everything is structured and to the instrumental and vocal approach. A bit more grandiose and disciplined than most other interpretations of grindcore I've heard, this is an obvious bridge for death metal enthusiasts trying to get into grind and, more than that, it's simply an excellent extreme metal offering. Given the brevity releases in this genre tend to have, this album could be considered “epic grind.” The songs here clock in at 4 to 5 minutes apiece and all contain a great deal of progression. As previously mentioned, they often feel like death metal tunes with frequent tremolos and drum patterns that sound like they emigrated to this album from Leprosy or Altars of Madness. 'Reek of Putrefaction' starts the album off with some slow, grandiose riffs juxtaposed with ghostly symphonic effects and continues the dark atmosphere with its menacing riffs through the rest of the song. Though the faux-symphonic elements are almost nonexistent from here on out, the rest of the album largely follows suit, with well-executed grinding interspersed with all sorts of spacier, more calculated riffs. Even within some individual songs, there's a good deal of variability. ‘Empathological Necrotism’ has some grooving that anticipates Pantera as well as an ominous guitar-driven fadeout. The sections where Symphonies of Sickness reaches its peak in terms of extremity are fairly nondescript, though the muddy production lets everything, including the sickening rasps and howls, slosh together in evil maelstroms that are plenty effective in their own right. Where the album truly shines is in its more disciplined moments, though, when creepy guitar lines poke their heads up above the carnage or a satisfying riff or groove takes over, which I’m pleased to say, happens through most of the 43-minute runtime. This monumental release blurs the line between grindcore and early death metal, providing fans of the latter a great introduction to the former, as well as a listening experience as intelligently written and passionately performed as it is savage (*Review by Valfars ).

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"necroticism - descanting the insalubrious"
Year: 1991
Label: Earache
Format: CD, LP
Tracks: 8
Time: 46 min.
Genre: rock
Style: Death Metal

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"swansong"

Year: 1995

Label: Earache

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 12

Time: 50 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Hard Rock Death Metal

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"heartwork"

Year: 1993

Label: Earache

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 11

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Death Metal

When the three English behemoths of death metal (Carcass, Bolt Thrower, Death) started marching in the mid/late-80’s, the fanbase knew instantly that the metal scenery would never be the same again; its brutalization was going to take much more tangible forms in the years to come… If we have to be very honest, though, grindcore didn’t spring from the metal field; it was entirely a product of the hardcore arena and, partially, the punk one. Still, it was inevitable the merger of the two fractions at some point in time, at least when the grindcore practitioners had acquired bigger musical skills… Of the three mentioned bands Carcass are by far the most commercially successful and the most creative outfit. They were constantly pushing the boundaries of what was possible within the metal template, unlike the Napalms who settled for their hyper-active death/grind/core barrage on “Harmony Corruption”, and haven’t looked away; or Bolt Thrower who found their doom-laden, battle-like niche with “Warmaster” and stuck with it throughout their subsequent discography. This wasn’t the Carcass way, though, as the Liverpudian gang already sounded more proficient on the death/grindcore hybrid “Symphonies of Sickness”, not to mention the fabulous “Necroticism…” which twisted cavernous riff-work must have thrown half the wannabe technical death metal practitioners at the time in despair. “Swansong” is “a swansong”, what the band could possibly do after such a tell-tale album-title… They had to split up, but only to rise from the medical textbooks in the new millennium with the excellent “Surgical Steel”. A tasty compendium of their last three instalments, this opus brought the band back in the game with full force seeing again hordes of fans ready to worship at the altar of these unique “death medical examiners”. Yes, the guys were badly missing from the scene, and it would be up to them to bring back the glorious days of British death metal in a heartbeat (*Review by Bayern ).

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