Before hearing What Horrors Await, I was only vaguely familiar with Jungle Rot. I knew they had been around for awhile and had heard bits and pieces of their stuff, enough to know they had a very groove based, old school death metal sound, so I pretty much knew what to expect and that’s exactly what I got.

What Horrors Await is an easy album to get into – it’s pure, straight forward death metal, loaded with catchy, mid-paced groove and packed into short songs, rarely topping the four minute mark. The guitar tone is thick and crunchy, the drums are solid and pounding but not overly busy, and the gutteral vocals are largely understandable, spewing forth the standard death metal rhetoric.

The only real downfall of the album is it’s monotony – it’s virtually 14 short tracks of the same thing over and over for 41 minutes. The pace rarely varies, consistently delivering the same mid paced, simple chug, with the exception of “Invisible Force”, which picks up the speed, if only a little bit. I think they could have left off about four tracks, shortening the length down to a cool half hour, and it wouldn’t seem to drag as much.

From what I gather though, this is Jungle Rot album in, album out – I’ve seen them equated to the AC/DC of death metal, and if this is true, I don’t see how a prior fan could be disappointed with What Horrors Await, because the material is well written, memorable, and simply crushes. It’s the polar opposite of all the tech death and deathcore that’s currently clogging up the scene.

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