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CEREBRAL ROT
Odious Descent Into Decay

20 Buck Spin (2019)
Rating: 9/10

With its murky acoustic intro, the lumbering title track of this behemoth of a record begins and we’re choked by the smoggy quicksand churn of Cerebral Rot’s debut album. Yep, 20 Buck Spin has done it again in becoming a roster for some of the best new death metal since the late 80s / early 90s.

Seattle, Washington’s Cerebral Rot play the death metal card that is very much soggy after spending too long in the local swamp. The riffs trudge through mulch-filled quagmires, the drums thud like a rotten limb slapped against a rusty churchyard bell, and the bass just gurgles like the pit of an unhealthy stomach about to burp up its bony, cyst-coated contents.

Meanwhile, the guttural vocal bellows have clearly swallowed too much wet dirt to give a damn, and when this crusty combo does decide to suddenly speed things up the whole chaotic sound is still one weighed down by vomit. Think old Autopsy and Bolt Thrower. You know, that fetid pile of steaming corpses that continues to inspire the youth of today to dredge up peat bogs in the hope of finding decomposing remnants to get high on.

This is one hell of a festering, squalid, algae-heavy death metal record, and I can’t get enough. That opening title track gnashes and burrows like age-old rusty farm machinery tossing bones to the surface; a morbidly obese guitar sound feasts upon its own excrement and there’s rarely time to breathe or a solo to emerge such is the rank, putrefying air conjured.

Just listen to the unhealthy, soiled drum clatters of ‘Swamped In Festering Excrementia’. This should have been the album title such is the drowning, claustrophobic and above all stale, putrid air of this sludgy, cloying noise. Mr Purveyor Of Destruction can barely call himself a vocalist as his mouth sounds bereft of tongue, leaving his sorry scab-coated hole to vomit out all manner of necessary evils before his caked torso heaves itself back into the swamp. Drummer Drew O’Bryant is a one-man army of the dead; limbs flailing and blood splattering all over the shop as his convulsing cadaver slows the beast and a macabre riff lumbers to meet the caustic bass of Zach Nehl.

Cerebral Rot are not presenters of technicality. Instead, tracks such as ‘Reeking Septic Mass’ chug and gnash, ideal then for a gangrenous foot to tap along to before detaching itself from the leg and hitting to floor for the flies to feast on. Meanwhile, namesake track ‘Cerebral Rot’ ups the speed and aggression and is probably the fastest onslaught the album has to offer. Here, the vocals echo through the gnarled trees as again the pace drops to a doom-laden and well soiled gloominess before we’re back to that hacking, slashing assault.

For me though, the standout cut is the seven-minute goregasm of ‘Sardonic Repentance’; an impure slog that again hammers with pace as drums rattle and the guitars hiss like a bloated corpse about to burst at its seams. Only foul odours permeate the world in which Cerebral Rot exist; this quartet content to dwell within the confines of some woodland shack whereby corpses decorate the walls and a chorus of buzzing flies provide the only other soundtrack to their ugly brutality.

‘Primordial Soup Of Radioactive Sewage’ is as apt a title as it gets; the band now in full drudgery mode as they comb the swamplands, dredge the lakes and desecrate graves, all accompanied by the drone of the suffocating guitar and that hissing, clanging drum sound.

Closing cut ‘Foul Stench Of Ruination’ begins in such squalid and downbeat fashion that I’m having to give my clothes another spin in the washing machine, because this is as doom-laden and fetid as death metal gets; bleak riffs rolling in catchy yet morbid fashion to a scene involving a horde of steaming zombies clawing at the light in order to escape the dust and maggots beneath them.

Prepare to be truly stifled by one of the year’s finest examples of funerary arrangements.

Neil Arnold

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