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ALTERED DEAD
Returned To Life

Memento Mori (2021)
Rating: 8/10

Five years have passed since Canada’s Altered Dead infected my ears, to the point that I’d forgotten all about this duo.

With its Lovecraftian-styled cover art I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this sophomore outing, especially as so much time had gone since the self-titled debut. However, if you like a more cosmically charged Autopsy then you’ll enjoy this down-tuned heap of drudgery.

Opening track ‘Mental Suicide’ already does enough to consume your body and spit out the bones with its massive, doom-laden riffs of heaving blubber – the guitars sound absolutely massive along with that pounding percussion. And once the pace picks up, the band very much become a hurry in the slurry as cloying, clogging vocals attempt to rid lungs of congealed phlegm only to find themselves dragged into the mire of cloying, clawing instrumentation. It’s ferocious yet sludgy, even in its pace the track suffocates with sickly aplomb before those gargantuan riffs once again resort to a mid-paced lumber.

Strange then that the album only runs for just over half-an hour; the duo of Julian and Mic somehow cramming in ten tracks of misery, rounded off with a cover, albeit an unnecessary one in my opinion, of Celtic Frost’s classic ‘Into The Crypts Of Rays’. After all, when you drown in the fetid guitar work of the title track or succumb to the fizzing, gaseous slop of ‘Empostomb’, you’ll realise just how out of place the Celtic Frost cover is, even if it’s a good one.

Altered Dead just specialises in crushing bogs of cacophonous quicksand; great lumbering slabs of moss-soaked gloom heaving from steaming bogs and choking on its own algae sick.

‘Final Pathogen’ gives chase like some overweight, sweathog of a serial killer pursuing you through the wetlands, with each rabid guitar chord creeping ever closer. Then the pace quickens and it’s on you, the stench, the dank breath and that final thud on the skull as your face is buried in the quagmire.

‘Ensanguine Path’ hurtles and bubbles, deviously mixed with glowing green potions of goo as the bass bubbles with ravenous propensity in tandem with those frantic meat thuds. And ‘Rotting Outwards’ slurps up similar remains of decay, the band providing that murky, miserable thrashy maniacal clatter that Autopsy created. Meanwhile, ‘…Of The Oppressed’ exudes rotten steam from its piles as the vocals become even more choked within the maze of gloomy guitar work and rhythmic thuds of creeping horror. It’s fantastic stuff for those, like me, who wallow in scabby sounds and garbled grossness.

Manky metal has a new name… Altered Dead. Choke on it!!!

Neil Arnold

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