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MORTUARY GHOUL
Corpse Exhumation EP

Self-released (2022)
Rating: 7.5/10

Crawling from out of nowhere (well, the darkest depths of Ohio to be more precise) is Mortuary Ghoul, a rather mysterious one-man band that quite simply trudge through the murky and mulch to provide grisly, horror-obsessed drudgery straight out of the Mortician case files.

Opener ‘Wear Your Face’ is mid-paced, muddy death metal with deep, churning quagmire chugging and low end, guttural vocals. Throw the amps into a tar pit, coat the guitar with compost and blast up the rusty furnace and you’ve Mortuary Drape. This festering heap of sludge death metal does nothing else except trudge dismally into its own swamp of bones.

‘Brain Stew’ follows the same squalid path, a track drenched in gore that chokes on its own bile. Meanwhile, ‘Brandishing The Chainsaw’ resorts to type, with the fetid marching of all instruments as appealing as a grinding generator in burning heat.

It’s no wonder that the movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre springs to mind. And the listener does get rewarded with some nice, atmospheric movie samples before the drowning trudges embark on another congealed journey.

Yes, it’s all rather one-dimensional, but there’s such a charm to such mid-paced butchery. ‘Deranged Motherhood Personified’, however, breaks the mould, hammering hard and fast, the vocals almost taking a step back from the gnashing dynamics, while ‘Sexual Intercorpse’ soon drags us back into the mire before we are finished off with a cover rendition of Mortician’s ‘Chainsaw Dismemberment’.

If you’ve got a spare 20 minutes and fancy some death metal debauchery, then why not put on your Ed Gein t-shirt and lend a severed ear to this pile of mash from the morgue.

Neil Arnold

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