Based on the cover, name and album title, I was fully bracing for some thrash metal here, but it turns out Massachusetts’ Scalpel are a death metal band with a fondness of older 90s death metal and East Coast Death metal.
There’s not much that needs to much explanation here. Scalpel’s second effort of no frills death metal goodness. Not game changing or anything but it crosses all the check boxes: shredding guitars, groove, blasts, dual growls, throbbing bass and competent song writing fill all 29 minutes and 10 songs.
You can hear almost every significant US/international death metal bands and some more underground ones here in the influences: Morbid Angel, Death, Suffocation, Cryptopsy, Carcass, Cannibal Corpse, Morta Skuld, Eternal Suffering et al all can be heard in standout tracks “Feeding the Worm”, “The Woodsman part II”, “Lung Butter” and “Brooding in the Gloom”.
They stray little from the path as there are no vast doomy segments or anything to ambitious, maybe a little sneaky melody here and there (“Intensified Festering”) Just gnarly, visceral, no frills death metal, as it should be.
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Love Scalpel! I like to call them “quality death metal” which may have been a term you coined at one time in a past review. They do death metal and do it well!
on Mar 7th, 2018 at 09:13I love this except that snare. good god, it’s just “bongbongbongbong” all the time.
on Mar 12th, 2018 at 14:31Snare is fine. Not terribly out of place. The kick drum sound is quite noticeably wonky. Regardless it’s cool material.
on Mar 19th, 2018 at 20:35