Written by vezzy on 31.05.2010 at 20:18

This is classic, goregrind Carcass. Sure, Heartwork is good too, but this is a pretty sick album.

Written by Numbskull on 31.05.2010 at 22:11

Written by vezzy on 31.05.2010 at 20:18

This is classic, goregrind Carcass. Sure, Heartwork is good too, but this is a pretty sick album.

Absolutely!

Every so often in Metal there comes something ground breaking. It may be a band, an album, or a song. This album is one of those times. In this case you have to listen with your mind not just your ears. The average person who listens to Pop music will go through their whole life only listening with their ears like a child who only eats sweets. That approach doesn't work with pioneering metal like this.

Yes, Mike Ivory probably should have been shot. But, Paul Talbot did good salvage job on an album that set many a Goregrind ship sailing in following decade. I put this album in the same category as pioneering albums like Venom's - Welcome to Hell and Possessed's - Seven Churches.

Written by Guest on 17.11.2012 at 02:37

Sickening and not in a good way, creating a new style is not an excuse for sounding like shit.

Written by Angelic Storm on 02.04.2013 at 01:44

Written by Guest on 17.11.2012 at 02:37

Sickening and not in a good way, creating a new style is not an excuse for sounding like shit.

To be fair to the band, it's not their fault the sound on the album is so awful. Even the band members themselves think the album sounds atrocious! It would be nice to hear this album with a similar production quality to "Symphonies Of Sickness". Then I'd be able to judge the individual songs more fairly. The production on this one is definitely one of the worst I've ever heard. I've heard demos recorded on cassettes that have superior sound quality!

Written by Lord_Regnier on 02.04.2013 at 03:33
This album sounds like shit. You can't even hear the riffs. And this comment comes from a Black Metal fan. I mean, I usually enjoy albums that most people would complain about the production ("In Battle There is No Law", early Bathory, early Kreator, Nocternity, "Show No Mercy", "Lugburz", "Nattens Madrigal", etc - I could name many others) but this is too much even for me in terms of production. I have some Black Metal demos in my collection that sound borderline shitty and I'm sure tons of people would dismiss outright as crap and they still sound not as bad as this album.

Written by Angelic Storm on 02.04.2013 at 12:59

Yep well, I actually love the sound on albums like "In Battle There Is No Law", "Endless Pain", and "Show No Mercy"... lol I don't see why anyone would have an issue with the sound on those albums. There's a warmth and a charm to albums with a harsher, rawer production, that albums with more clean, polished production lacks. However, with those albums I mentioned and other albums with a similar, lo-fi production, the riffs can still be heard clearly. There is a great deal of difference between raw production, and production which is simply rubbish. And the production on "Reek Of Putrefaction" falls squarely into the latter category. Many of the riffs are indescipherable, and this is highlighted all the more during the album's many blast beat sections, where the sound just descends into a complete mess.

The only reason I didn't rate the album lower, is because on the small amount of occasions when I'm actually able to hear a riff, they are very good. And also because this is one of the pioneering grind albums (although I think Symphonies... was more influential). But an album with sound as awful as this just can't be given a high rating. Production needs to be really awful before I will severely hold it against an album, and the production on this album unfortunately fits the credentials for being truly awful.

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I don't see any reason to complain about production on "In Battle There Is No Law", "Endless Pain" and "Show No Mercy", indeed. For me, it's perfectly fine as it is. But I heard many complaints about the sound on those albums in the past. The sound just adds to the harshness and atmosphere, Imo.


Sure, there is a huge difference between raw production and shitty production. Just take "Death Magnetic" and "World Painted Blood" as examples. None of them are raw but both have rubbish production. And both bands released much rawer material in their early days, yet the old albums sound much better than their recent ones. Unlike some people believe raw doesn't equal shitty.

Yes, production has to be really crappy for me to complain. Usually, I complain much more about being "too polished" and "overproduced" than being poorly produced.
The only genre in which I like it a bit more polished (and it's really only a little bit here) is Death Metal, even if my tastes in DM are old school. I think when DM is too raw, it tends to sound too much as a chaotic mess. But for me to complain about production being too raw on a DM album, it has to sound really bad. I mean, I love a raw Black Metal production but I think it doesn't serve a DM album very well, if it's nearly as raw as Black Metal. The more chaotic nature of DM makes it hard to hear things well enough when production is really raw, especially if the drummer uses lots of blast beats (which is very often the case in DM). For example, I could not imagine how Nile or Origin would sound with a production kinda like Darkthrone or Taake. I think it would be unlistenable.
Yet I prefer by far the old school DM sound to the plastic shit we often hear nowadays.