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INHUMAN
Unseen Dead

GrimmDistribution / Sevared (2020)
Rating: 8/10

Unseen Dead is the third full-length studio album from this Costa Rican four-piece, and is certainly worth checking out if you like rather grey, humourless yet heavy, and technical death metal.

From start to finish this eight-track affair is aggressive, jarring and musically akin to being thrown into a meat grinder while vocalist Sergio Muñoz (who sadly passed away prior to the album’s release) barks orders to his henchmen to keep on turning the handles.

Throughout the record, the band combine grinding, scathing sections mixed with nifty passages of complexity yet all the while maintaining the utmost aggression. In fact, this is probably one of the most aggressive albums you’ll hear this year as the band charges through the throaty onslaught of tracks such as ‘The Day You Die’ and ‘The Poisoned’, both of which display brutality yet a thrashing fluency.

At times the speed of the band is dizzying as leads scurry with mayhem and drums hammer in astonishing fashion. Again I refer to ‘The Poisoned’, particularly on the closing moments. But what I truly adore about this bunch of hyper lunatics is their ability to remain so engrossing without truly bamboozling.

‘Careful What You Fear’ rakes you like machine gun fire. At times, bands such as Decapitation or even Cannibal Corpse may spring to mind, although this feels greyer, steelier, and maybe more mechanized. Earache is guaranteed even when the band begins a track such as ‘The Last Prophet’, which is so angular and sharp as the band resorts to a cutting, scathing chug, evoking images of great machines choking on their own fumes amidst great crumbling blocks of stone.

Sergio Muñoz’s harsh tone leaves me breathless, and how this guy operated through such a mire of wires and protruding grates of ash is beyond me. But the whole band deserves recognition for such a pummelling display.

Drummer David Salazar clearly is more machine than man as he muscles his way through sweat, steam and debris. On the title track the band melts all faces with their thrashing tirade, while closer ‘Devil’s Deeds’ is like Sodom, Destruction et al. deathed up.

Unseen Dead is a hard n’ fast record that hurts with every grind, beat and growl. It’s neither old or new school, but one which steamrolls with such unrelenting intensity, give or take a few of those complex shifts, but it still remains on the straight n’ narrow track with one intention… to force you into submission and to parade your corpse for the ragged, miserable, bullet-ridden sight that it is.

Neil Arnold

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