Band:	Afterbirth
Album:	Four Dimensional Flesh
Style:	Brutal death metal
Release date:	March 13, 2020
A review by:	RaduP

01. Beheading The Buddha
02. Spiritually Transmitted Disease
03. Girl In Landscape
04. Everything In Its Path
05. Never Ending Teeth
06. Minimum Safe Distance
07. Rooms To Nowhere
08. Swallowing Spiders
09. Dreaming Astral Body
10. Black Hole Kaleidoscope
11. Four Dimensional Flesh

Brutal death metal, as technical as it often is, has remained pretty stagnant in the past years and missed most developments that death metal has had in the past decade. Enter Afterbirth.

Technically Afterbirth have entered a long time ago, having been formed in 1993. The short two year stint aside (one that was compiled in the Foeticidal Embryo Harvestation compilation), Afterbirth were reformed in 2013, and it seemed like they would finally release their debut album when their lead singer, Matt Duncan, passed away. Replaced by Artificial Brain's Will Smith (I too wish it was that Will Smith we're all thinking of) and finally released The Time Traveler's Dilemma. What I found most compelling about this is that the same folks who were around when brutal death metal was in its infancy, are around to take it forward too. I have to admit that brutal death metal and slam are two of the metal genres I care about the least. So when I first listened to The Time Traveler's Dilemma's dilemma I wasn't sure if I would buy into all the hype it generated, but it blew me away. Years later, we finally have a follow-up with Four Dimensional Flesh.

This is, after all, brutal death metal, so expect to feel that in spades. The vocals are still those gurgly gutturals, and those will be the thing that strikes you first. The drums often go into the trademark blast beats and you're certain to find plenty of slams. All fine and dandy, but just like The Time Traveler's Dilemma, Four Dimensional Flesh brings so much more into that to make it sound like the most brutal take on space retro-futurism you'll hear. As much as it slams and gurgles, it's still filled with the wonder of the vastness of space, and of humanity's place in this whole thing. And to give some life to that feeling, it's also a lot more atmospheric and progressive than even its predecessor.

I admit that its progressive and atmospheric tendencies are still more subtle than I would want them to be. It's easy to listen to this, register the brutal death metal part and just keep listening to it as a brutal death metal album, since this is the most initially striking thing about it. And it's pretty hard to see the instrumental as progressive when you have Will Smith spilling gurgles over it. That's the beauty of it. You really don't see the expansive interludes coming, but when they do, it's a sign that there's some attention to be paid. Once "Girl In Landscape" comes around, it feels like the brutality subsides a bit to make it just a bit easier to feel just how intricate and progressive it really is, and it really helps that the production is not only top notch but it also doesn't overpower the vocals, as is the case with a lot of brutal death metal. So it often feels like it juggles between some Visceral Disgorge, some mid-era Death, and putting some Deftones in between. Rarely is there an album where the interludes actually play such an important role in changing how the album is perceived.

Every player here is obviously in really great form, but they don't really engage in technicality for the sake of technicality the way a lot of brutal/tech death bands do. There's a rhyme and a reason to everything. It's brutal and straightforward when it needs to be. It's technical and intricate when it needs to be. It's expansive and atmospheric when it needs to be. It doesn't shy away from any of those, and it doesn't shy away from putting them side by side and showing how they're not actually mutually exclusive. A death metal album can be progressive even if the vocals sound like the vomiting of guts. A death metal album can sound transcendental and still slam.

Now that they showed that it can be done, brutal death metal has no excuse to stagnate. Get on with the times.