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SCORCHED
Ecliptic Butchery

20 Buck Spin (2018)
Rating: 9/10

And once again label 20 Buck Spin has vomited out a horrendously brilliant heap of festering, foaming and unflinching death metal in the form of American band Scorched and their sophomore outing.

With its combinations of manic, obliterating haste and slower, grinding depths of depravity, you won’t find many death metal albums better this year and that’s high praise for Delaware’s Scorched when one considers the amount of quality records that have emerged this year within the genre.

Everything about this despicable, blood-churned opus is heavy. With the grisly, guttural growls, the punishing, toiling riffs, the brutal percussive blasts, the bludgeoning bass, you can throw this one in the same murky cavern as Tomb Mold, Mortuous et al.

Ecliptic Butchery, with its crude yet effective cover art and titles such as ‘Blood Splatter Eclipse’, ‘Mortuary Of Nightmares’, ‘Barbarous Experimentation’ and ‘Dissected Humanity’, is one of those records which immediately digs its infected claws into the skin. As each track unravels we have a veritable smorgasbord of unhealthy underworld expressions; cavernous, booming rhythms which echo around cold, damp walls.

Tracks such as ‘Exhibits Of Torture’ and ‘Disfiguring Operations’ marry speedier segments with out-and-out sepulchral trauma, where cosmic horrors are bred with earthly terrors to result in an amalgamation of classic death metal styles. The early 90s influence is very much dominant throughout as maggots tumble from the yawning chasm of Matt Kapa’s putrid bellows. The catchiness is also unquestionable; Scorched providing bruising and depraved yet sometimes familiar eargasms but all remains shrouded in a fusty coating.

Although thickly produced throughout, it’s the general execution of instrumentation which provides the foul air of ungodliness; great doomy wallops served up with lashings of murkiness as tirades of stuffy death speed merge with those suffocating, dragging fumes of mid-paced butchery. Flecks of the classic Swedish scene emerge, but just like 2016 debut outing Echoes Of Dismemberment, Ecliptic Butchery dishes up that filthy Autopsy-cum-Bolt Thrower mixed with everything else which mattered in the scene back in the halcyon days. The members carve off huge chunks of pus-filled meat and force you to gorge on the sickening chugs of monstrous slabs such as ‘Darkness Infests’, while a maniacal solo attempts to infiltrate the poisoned air.

And yet with those expected formulas we find ourselves choking upon seemingly unorthodox strains too, as interesting rhythms abound within the eternally macabre overall structure. The end result is a pulverising yet gloom-coated death metal record competing for one of the best releases of 2018.

Neil Arnold

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