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SLAUGHTERDAY
Abattoir EP

FDA (2018)
Rating: 8/10

Having reviewed 2013 debut album Nightmare Vortex, and 2014 EP Ravenous, it seems only right that I should return to the dismal crags of nooks of German blood gurglers Slaughterday, who also, in 2016, released their second full-length opus entitled Laws Of The Occult.

New EP Abattoir offers no real surprises, but as one would have hoped is brim full of pus, snot, sewage and human debris. Two of the six tracks excreted are covers in the form of Trouble’s ‘Victim Of The Insane’ and the Amorphis tune ‘Grails Mysteries’.

Both renditions are treated with splattery effect from Jens Finger (guitar and bass) and Bernd Reiners (vocals and drums), who elsewhere coat everything in that murky, phlegm-clogged sound that stinks of Autopsy and the likes as each track vomits up blood clots and cysts in impure doom / death fashion.

The vocals are the expected bouts of gargled sickness, with Reiners sounding as if his intestines are being chewed on, while his funereal drum nods are as equally bleak as Finger’s putrefying chords which lumber with mouldy accord.

It doesn’t really matter where you decide to dip into this EP, because you just know that you’re either gonna pluck out a juicy festering eyeball, a burst, sticky vein or if you’re even more fortunate, a still beating yet heavily leaking heart of crimson and black.

My personal favourite is the gloomy whine of ‘Phantasmal Death’, which is somewhat of a funeral procession initially before those congested vocal scowls toy with the menace and melancholy.

But it’s not all downtrodden and despairing. Okay, so I lied, because even when Slaughterday do jerk into an instinctive gallop it simply evokes the image of a twitching corpse that soon becomes flaccid and seeps a fume of gas, and that would be the bubbling bass, trickling, oozing mere fodder for the maggots. Oh to the joys of ‘Wasteland Of Demise’ with its sickening trudge, and then there’s that smoggy, fog-laced solo to herald more doom.

The opening title track and the putrid ‘Cursed By The Dead’ are both smeared with those bony fragments that Autopsy have occasionally left in their wake; Slaughterday acting like some undead scavenger feverishly lapping at the discarded sores, pustular bumps and general oily emissions.

I’d like to have seen two more studio tracks instead of the covers, but it’s nice that the guys have opted for less predictable fare, even if we know what’s coming with those septic chimes of bile and ulcerated growls. Then again, where would us salivating worshippers of gore be without such slurping and sloppy hernias of doom! For me, of the two, it’s the Trouble classic which gets a truly grisly reworking – somehow their original traipse of gloom seems to fit with Slaughterday’s haze of misery.

Now, grab yourself a meat hook, slide open the blood-spattered iron door and prepare to be hung up like a pig and bled dry in this choking, flesh-fumed room of horror.

Neil Arnold

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