MUTILATE
“TORMENTIUM”
Album Review by Dark Juan

1/10

Mutilate are:

Al Sandberg – Bass
Thompson Marsh – Drums
Hans Christianson – Guitar
Simon Kirke – Vocals

Jesus Christ in a chariot driven sidecar. My poor ears.

Mutilate are an American “death cum black metal” band. They also succeed in insulting your intelligence from across an ocean. I’m on a different fucking continent to them and I can feel my IQ dropping. This really is lowest common denominator death metal for 12 year olds with no quality control. There is zero black metal influence in their music and their desire to ape Cannibal Corpse, but with a tenth of the musical talent, is painfully obvious. Aiming for a demographic which would include Autopsy, Death, Carcass and Morbid Angel fans, they are that terribly wide of their target they have just earned themselves a resolution against themselves from the United Nations. The collateral damage is staggering.  I have so many problems with this record it’s difficult to know where to start….

OK – let’s start with the production job. I don’t know who did because I didn’t get a press kit and I am just so appallingly disinterested I cannot be arsed to research it. All I know is that it is amateurish at best and downright shocking at worst. The poor drummer (the only man in the band with a modicum of actual talent) sounds like he recorded his drums in the lavatory of a particularly unpleasant sanitarium with microphones made of tin cans and wire, the guitar vacillates wildly between mushy, thick and blunt with quite the worst fuzzbox and distortion I have ever heard. It sounds like it was recorded in the guitarist’s bedroom on a 15 watt practice amp made out of RSJs and yoghurt on to a tape cassette (remember them?) The bass is either inaudible or disgracefully out of time, and the vocals…. Oh, the vocals. Remember the magnificently named Erwin Von Scarborough, erstwhile vocalist of early Morbid Angel? And how terrible he was? Or Glen Benton in his early days? As in rough as a bird’s arse, unlistenable and generally enough to make you throw up in horror and disgust? Obviously the vocalist in this group has listened to a lot of death metal, and then has decided that adding reverb and echo is a good idea to beef up a mediocre grunt. It really isn’t. All it does is offer the listener a welcome distraction from the considerable amount of banality on offer. I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than listen to anymore of this shit but I have a duty to you, dear reader, to faithfully report the whole album.  He doesn’t sing with any power or precision, he just randomly grunts over second rate guitar work, with utterly appalling solos. I have never heard a band who are so disinterested in their own sound. I can’t work out whether it is all a terrible joke or whether these people are serious! Putting lipstick on a sow doesn’t make it pretty. It’s still a pig. Which is what this terrible, awful shitstorm of a record is. It’s so old fashioned to be almost comedic. For Mutilate, the musical world stopped somewhere around 1996, but at a really shit bit where any death metal band coming out of Morrisound Studios in Florida was hailed as the saviour of death metal. Mutilate are not going to save death metal. They are busily killing it stone dead, raping the corpse, mutilating it and having conversations with the parts they have kept in their dingy basement room whilst their mother calls them up for their tea. And another thing that winds me up to fuck…… repeating themselves. Especially on the ending of the song Sadistic Butchery, where they spend OVER A MINUTE repeating the words sadistic butchery. Which rather succintcly sums up the torture of listening to this disgraceful bunch of chancers. They have succeeded in turning my brain to spam, my ears into raging torrents of suffering and have had me screaming for the torture to stop for the past twenty minutes. The things I do for you lot out there…

Thank whatever deity of your choice that I have had a beer or three tonight and am feeling very pleasantly disposed towards the world at large this evening otherwise I might have been really unpleasant about Mutilate. Oh wait…. the titles of the songs are hilarious for all the wrong reasons. We have such genre classics as Engulfed In Sludge, Splattered Remains, and Human Experimentation. For fuck’s sake Carcass did that in 1987! And had better song titles too. I don’t see the modern equivalent of Mucopurulence Excretor or Manifestation Of Verrucose Urethra on Mutilate’s record. Also, for the record, teenage me and my friend Andy White spent ages in Vibes Music in Bury laughing our arses off at the song titles on Reek of Putrefaction when we were at college. And I love Carcass. The difference is that Carcass had a sense of humour, where Mutilate, I fear, are deadly serious about their music.

To sum up for you, the record buying public, then: Unintelligent, uninspired, poorly played, fucking poorly produced, banal, insipid, jejeune, unpleasant, miserable, pathetic, painful and meaningless. Retro in all the wrong ways. Utterly, UTTERLY pointless and the second worst metal record I have ever reviewed. They would have to be pretty heroic to plumb the depths that Warrior Soul did, though. If you like music that never got out of the Nineties, sounds like it was produced for 10p and a blow job in a garage in Worksop and has all the worst clichés and none of the talent of any splattercore band that has gone before then you might wish to listen to this record. Otherwise, don’t bother and spend your money on a shitload of dex and gabble the night away to a disinterested stranger. You will have more fun and you will save yourself from the horror I just endured.

Pass me the bleach. I’m pouring it into my ears to clean them of the contamination of Mutilate. As soon as this review is uploaded for publishing I’m deleting the fuckers off my hard drive.

Avoid.

The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System wishes this band would fuck off back to their day jobs and never bother him again and awards Mutilate 1/10 simply for not being Warrior Soul. This is similar to finding a spot or two of blood on your front doorstep and calling the police and getting a crime number and a vague promise that an officer will attend when one is available. In like 2023.

TRACKLIST (sigh…. the banality is killing me.)

Tormentium ( I mean, come on. It’s not even a proper word unless it’s a crass Americanism like burglarized or murderlized… It sounds like some second rate horror flick copying Pandorum or suchlike for fuck’s sake!)
Hail To The Dead (Because they can’t suffer Mutilate anymore. The lucky bastards!)
Engulfed In Sludge (Sounds like a Saturday morning kids’ TV show in the UK to me.)
Calculated Extermination (Oh, do fuck off.)
Splattered Remains (Sounds like a crappy 80s thrash band from Belo Horizonte or something.)
Human Experimentation (You can feel the inspiration and originality seeping away…)
Severed Limbs (Surely the ideas for song titles had dried up at this point.)
Life In Pain (This is me, at this point of the album.)
Sadistic Butchery (What I wanted to practice upon my own ears.)
Execution (Or A Blessed Relief from the torture. Thank fuck its over!)

mutilatedeathmetal.bandcamp.com
www.facebook.com/mutilatedeathmetalofficial/

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