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MORTUARY GHOUL
Friends With The Dead

Dismal Fate (2023)
Rating: 8/10

I hope many of you heard, and hopefully purchased, Mortuary Ghoul’s Corpse Exhumation EP which emerged last year. It was a taster for what squalid expressions were to come, and Friends With The Dead, the debut full-length length from this Ohio act, does not disappoint.

As soon as ‘Day Of Horror’ comes grinding in one cannot ignore the obvious Mortician influence as those congealed riffs trudge through manure like a pitchfork-wielding maniacal farmer. If you delighted in but didn’t understand the cover art, it’s a homage to cult 70s movie Deranged which took inspiration from the real life crimes of Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein.

The traipsing sound of this album successfully relays the murkiness of the 70s horror genre as ‘Mummified Ma’ grinds and gnashes like a failing furnace torching its last victim. Heavy, sleazy and putrid, this album rarely steps out of its comfort zone of doom-grind. Littered with film samples – which I’m a sucker for – tracks such as ‘Obituary Indication’, ‘Gore Décor’, ‘Fatal Reminder’ and closer ‘Deranged’ fuse repulsive blasts with fetid sludge, and only occasionally will such slithering compost flicker with a spasm suggesting a shift of pace.

Of the ten tracks on offer it is the brief slop of ‘Farmhouse Decay’ and the pounding title track which really get me going, but the whole sorry mess is a mass of rotten flesh swarming with flies. No, it’s not original but it sure as hell makes me want to raid my VHS shelves and binge on some 70s rot.

Neil Arnold

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