The Heretic’s Fork (an expectedly awful medieval torture device) is one of those ‘mysterious’ bands with no bio, information, facebook, or bandcamp page, heck these guys are not even up at Metal Archives. But here is what I’m assuming is their debut album, and its 8 tracks of muddy, chaotic, dissonant brutal death metal.

At 27 minutes and 8 songs, Tormentore blows by in a furious minute, delivering a super murky unrelenting style that has the fugue of Auroch, Abyssal,early Portal,  Ruin, Autokrator, Valdur and such. The guitars are rough and ready, the vocals are distant, moist growls, and the drums, even with a tinny snare, deliver a thunderous backdrop to the rather incessant discordance.

Individual songs are hard to identify except when there is a tumultuous slower passage such as “Unhuman Engorgement”, “Sacrosanct Disembowelment” or closer ” Vespers of Torment”and while the band seems to have one toe slightly on the slam/brutal death metal genre (ie that snare drum), the slow downs are not really slams per se, more like…..slurches?

And while all the songs have some sort of skin sloughing ooze, it’s largely a sonic landslide of rotting meat and feces tumbling with complete abandon as heard on opener “Realms of Unmitigated Anguish”, “Concealed in Infamy”,  or “Diminished unto Lunacy”. A few Inquisition-y Vincent Price/Witchfinder General samples show up between tracks, but they don’t distract and add to the band’s torturous moniker and theme.

A nasty little slab of atonal filth that should leave fans of the sound pretty appeased.

[Visit the band's website]

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