Label: 20 Buck Spin
Release date: March 21st, 2025
Here comes one more band I suspect of being a young one. But there’s some common point in cases of Corpus Offal and Becerus. It absolutely isn’t about place of origin or something like that. Corpus Offal’s place of origin is the capital city (and forth the most populous city of this state) of Texas. So, what is common for both mentioned before ensembles? Well, that’s two things, actually. The first one is the fact that in the band play experienced musicians who are or/and were members of several hordes representative of several genres of extreme music. The second one is even more general – both Corpus Offal and Becerus serve us the creativity we call death metal.
But music itself is quite different. First of all, songs are much longer in case of the debut album of our American friends. Seven of them takes almost, without three seconds, forty-nine and half minutes. So, you can deduce by yourselves we’re dealing here with musical road roller rather than an intensive massacre. However, the end effect is basically the same – total destruction of a listener! The only difference is that just reviewed stuff will crush you instead of tearing you apart. Tempo is the slowest, sometimes you can even associate it more with doom than death. At the same time, both riffs and common character of what we listen to leave no doubt that we’re dealing with this second sub-genre of our beloved music. Of course, some fragments can be attributed to the first one I mentioned a few lines before or even Suicidal Black. Well, in my opinion it’d be quite a large abuse and wouldn’t have a substantive basis at all. Corpus Offal’s creativity is, we can say, too varied to be associated with something other than old school death metal. Guys know very well how to speed-up, there’s quite a lot of guitar and bass tricks or passages. They’re maybe not too complicated, but you can easily recognize guys who know what their instruments were created for.
That’s why I don’t think this is typical American style of death metal. Of course, even in the United States there are very well-known ensembles who play like that. But it’s still not what, let’s call it, the average metalhead thinks about when they hear the words “American school of playing death metal”, even if mainly due to the subject of lyrics the association with cult ensemble coming from Oakland, California is very justified. It has quite a lot to do with bands who, I suppose and have such feelings, are forgotten and totally unknown to younger generations of metal fans. Well, honestly, I somehow can understand the case of one of them, because this coming from Os/Bergen horde existed only four years, 1988 -1992, and recorded only demos as well as EP. Personally I love “Abduction of Limbs”, but at the same time I know only freaks like me were as deep in the underground, so… But I can’t imagine how the hell it is possible to not know a masterpiece called “…in Pain”. Of course, my associations don’t mean you’ll find exactly the same creativity on “Corpus Offal”. Anyway, there are some touches mentioned before, of course indirectly, a cult ensemble formed 1987 – and here I’m talking about purely music ones.
At the end of my scribble, I could write only the same thing I wrote in the case of Becerus. But I think it’d be boring to read the same sentence all the time. That’s why I’ll tell you who, when and in what formats released this shit. March 21st 20 Buck Spin has graced us with all possible versions known by the modern phonographic market. So, feel free to choose the one you want to have and buy it!
