RSS Feed


AUTOPSY
The Headless Ritual

Peaceville (2013)
Rating: 8.5/10

And so they have returned, with blood dripping from their foaming jaws and all manner of mutilated limbs stashed in their cars… the mighty Autopsy.

Moving on quickly from 2011’s Macabre Eternal, the San Francisco combo have jumped into a new coffin and called it The Headless Ritual, which, for me anyway, is one of the year’s most anticipated albums.

If ever there was a band to be bestowed the title of “Kings of Gore Metal” then it’s this bunch of depraved souls, who once again have stained our imaginations with another filthy beast of a record that features ten tracks of perverse bloodlust, zombification and serial murder. Autopsy is indeed the grottiest soundtrack anyone could come up with and they’ve been ruining our minds since their classic 1989 debut opus Severed Survival, and the killing spree continues.

Vocalist / drummer Chris Reifert is back on fine, regurgitative form, spewing up his innards over his rotten skins while his comrades in chaos wield their instruments as if they were implements of murder. Eric Cutler (vocals / guitar), Danny Coralles (guitar) and Joe Trevisano (bass) are clearly unstable individuals who, alongside Reifert, have carved out another skull of murderous echoes for us to peer into.

The album opens with the sordid chugs of ‘Slaughter At Beast House’, which is the sort of mucky track that showcases the schizophrenic abilities of the band as they puke forth a barrage of unholy drums and fleshy chunks of guitar and bass before dwelling within miserable basements and cellars in search of all manner of vermin to feed on. The drowned vocals remind one of a serial killer barking sadistic orders to his latest shackled victim.

Moments later we’re swamped by the gory escapades of ‘Mangled Far Below’, which drags us into another crawlspace to eat silt, soil and shit as the band rattle along like a skeleton tied to the back of a pick-up truck.
Autopsy are the masters of their trade, spewing up all manner of bile-coated riffs in their quest for musical insanity.

Even when the band resort to cyst-sized lumps of speed, the down-tuned guitars and rumbling bass always remind us of the horrors that await us round the corner, which usually meets us in a dirty dirge of a track like the seven-and-a-half minutes of ‘She Is A Funeral’ with its psychotic opening chords and gurgles of splintered bone and pus-filled clumps.

This is Autopsy at their most sickening and dour, resorting to primitive drum beats that sound as if Reifert is bashing his stained skins with severed limbs as those dank guitars ring out with their echoes of misery. ‘Coffin Crawlers’, ‘When Hammer Meets Bone’ and the sinister sludge of ‘Arch Cadaver’ creep by and leave you wanting a night with the disinfectant, such are their seedy quality.

The album is wrapped up with a trio of terrors, beginning with the jarring ‘Flesh Turns To Dust’, while ‘Running From The Goathead’ with its furious, maniacal introduction and black metal harshness leads us into the closing title track, with its ghastly instrumental groans and stalking drum; it’s nothing more, merely a gloomy jam bereft of vocals that’ll have us jumping out of our beds for nights to come in fear of the blood-spattered bogeyman.

So, The Headless Ritual is proof that some bands can revel in their predictability, because the anomaly that is Autopsy feels no need to do anything except lumber through the sewers like some overweight serial killer in search of a damp corner to store his later violated victim. Who needs innovation, experimentation or modern dynamics when your original method of killing works just fine?

Neil Arnold