Band:	Tennessee Murder Club
Album:	Carving A Legacy
Style:	Death metal
Website:	http://www.tennesseemurderclub.com/
Release date:	2011
A review by:	KwonVerge

01. Ante Mortem
02. Hellspeak
03. Polluted
04. The Lion's Den
05. Spade and Lyme
06. Flesh Mob
07. Chloroform
08. Cyborg Deathbed
09. Imperium
10. Gray Matter
11. Recluse

What would you expect from a bunch of Americans dressed up in similar uniforms and different masks? You guessed right, something in the vein of Slipknot which in that case isn't true. Tennessee Murder Club move in death metal soundscapes and the cover artwork indicates what happened to the last person that dared to defy their work, half the upper body for the dude with the double axe, half the lower part for the hordes.

They've been around for about 2 years now and it didn't take them that long to fulfill their first full-length, Carving A Legacy. I'm pretty sure the band consists of serial killers covering their faces with the horror of their victims; they went a step further to multiply the list of their artifacts and embraced music so as to inflict their dominance to a wider extent. One may notice that they definitely have their faster moments where a form of sickening violence unfolds. The band proves, though, that the real lurking horror lies in their mid-tempo passages that have to be the personification of slow torture and are filled with murder-for-pleasure through the eyes of the victimizer; you're the victim. There's a certain groove in the guitars and it couldn't be missing, it's death metal we're talking about after all. The rhythm section strengthens the groove factor but also lends more dynamism to the compositions just like it should.

What the band's trying to achieve is to meet and greet old school death metal with parts of its later faces, henceforth the sound truth lies somewhere in the middle, with ideas coming straight from both its first era but also from the years that followed. Of course the vocals have a guttural sound that has a slightly spitting core-driven edge at times. You'll also witness some small doses of melody on the guitars through some leads as well as a few inspired solos. And the fact that there are instrumental compositions it's something positive since they add a more atmospheric vibe to the album and everything the band presents. For example the opening "Ante Mortem" gets you in the mood, the recitations of "Spade And Lyme" hold a clinical touch, and the keyboard-driven "Imperium" connects somehow to the Halloween theme makes you feel like Michael Myers is outside of your window and waits for the right moment to invade your privacy; meaning your guts.

They're not presenting something you've never heard before, that's not their goal after all. With respect to the sound they preserve they tend to offer a decent debut album that has the potential to disembowel your physical internal world.