BLOODCUT
The Old Cemetery Stories
Support Underground (2017)
Rating: 7.5/10
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Here is a slice of relatively obscure Slovakian death metal. Formed in 2015, Bloodcut are the duo of Slavek and Janek who are responsible for this mouldy lump of atmospheric noise which offers up seven tracks, along with four bonus tracks which made up 2016’s Remains Of The Deceased EP.
The Old Cemetery Stories offers more of the same musty, rank bass-heavy foulness which lives up to its rather murky cover art and song titles such as ‘Opening The Coffin’, ‘Left To Rot’ and ‘We Are Zombies’. What we get is a trudging, often mid-paced style of gloomy death metal that drifts between those all too familiar old school sounds. Whether it’s in the form of a Swedish grind, or a Dutch dryness coupled that with an Autopsy-style of slop and miserable Death-like strains, you know that you’re on to a winner.
This is a record that clunks along nicely, seemingly out of place to the rest of the graves and coughing along like a diseased cadaver rising from the grave. There’s a lot of atmosphere. In fact, the album stinks of decay – the fusty gurgles of ‘Strange Family Secrets’ and ‘Horrible Experience’ bring bursts of controllable pace, although nothing ever fast enough to blow away the cob-webs.
But when things to get gritty and grotesque, that’s when these guys really come in to their own. Again I refer to that clanking bass and the horrid percussive tumbles and ghoulish trudges of ‘Left To Rot’; this one just nods, but can’t rid itself of the swarming blowflies which circle its mutated, yet decomposed form. The drums are just an unearthly rattle and the guitars a dismal heap of scattered human debris by which Janek’s vocal stir and then commentate like a hideous preacher of the dead.
You may be surprised to find out that the drums are programmed, but don’t let this put you off. This record sounds just as fetid as any other death metal album you’ve heard over the last decade; its stale odour coming to the fore again with the squelching ‘House Of Blood’ which offers more pace, more progression and more tempo shifts than a funeral procession rumbling down a mountain side track.
Death metal fans should really give this opus a chance, because here’s a band not simply reliant on generic outbursts. Instead, Bloodcut use bass and drum as deadly, clumping weapons and a simple yet effective vocal chestiness to manifest an utterly drab and dreary selection of songs littered with splattered speedy haunts and culminating in the squalid jigs of ‘Flesh Eaters’. The Old Cemetery Stories is rough ‘n’ ready stuff that you should ignore at your peril.
Neil Arnold
