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SKELETAL GORE
The Stench Of Catacomb EP

Lunar Light (2021)
Rating: 8/10

Here’s some Italian death metal to accompany you on those night shifts. Succumb then to the chugging manifestation of the bass-driven menace of ‘The Dark That Lays Beneath’ – this is some seriously sinister subterranean murkiness. I’m of the assumption that bass player Sinistro is plucking human bones and his vocals are their desperate, chalk-coated rasps.

This is grisly death metal that needs to be heard; slow, creeping leaks of fetid bile trickle and dribble from each orifice as this trio trudges like some procession of morgue escapees lumbering to their steaming graves.

Everything about this muddy EP is murky, mouldy and festering with tomb juice. The rancid soil clogs up the arteries as pace is injected through the miserable chimes of ‘Suffering’; a truly disgusting heap of putrid misery formed by melancholic guitar work from a chap named Shane, who probably concocted such rhythmic perversity while digging graves. And as for the skin slaps of drummer Hammer, well, he’s clearly just cracking skulls with whatever bones he can find.

The death metal scene is burgeoning at the moment and I’d like to add this band from Siracusa, Sicily to the list of acts to look out for, because this one squelches in all the right places to the point that you’ll be choking on your innards by the time the morbid rolls of the flabby ‘Mental Illness’ come ravenously charging for your throat.

This is Skeletal Gore at their most aggressive; snapping and gnashing like a host of hungry undead. The riffs chug in dirty, rhythmic grimness and the vocals just bark like rabid dogs.

I’d also like to pick out other gloriously gory gems such as ‘Catacomb Stench’, which again brings that bile-covered bass tone and grinding axe attack in deadly tandem with gruesome percussion. It’s all just a horrible, rancid composition of decomposition drenched in murkiness and that Autopsy-style of punky attitude as cackles echo from bleak, dusty tombs and horrid fumes fill the nostrils with each clanking bass line.

When I hear death metal I want it to be rotten, not clean cut, not well-produced or polished. I want to be at one with the maggot-littered earth and be dragged into the sorry, squalid pits, and that’s exactly what Skeletal Gore’s debut EP does. Get out there and support the underground because this one has more wretched fumes than an open casket funeral.

Neil Arnold

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