So, I’m playing a bit of catch up here having just recently received CDs from new label Blast Head Records, based out of Canada and Belgium’s Shiver Records, so expect a few late 2011 releases, seeing as they sent actual CDs not digital files.

First up is the first release from Blast Head Records, the fifth album from one band gore/grind band Splattered Entrails, otherwise known as Mike O’ Hara who has served in various brutal death metal acts like Cordectomy, Malodorous, Expulsive Incision and Noctem. Like other one man brutal death metal act Putrid Pile, O’Hara is surprisingly prolific and does all the instruments him self, which in this case means a drum machine for the drums, and to be honest the drum machine is the only real drawback of this other wise impressive and indeed brutal album.

Having not heard this project before, I wasn’t familiar with the outfit’s previous albums, but it appears Splattered Entrails were a more porno/cyber grind based band but Nauseate apparently sees O’Hara explore more traditional and epic sounding brutal death metal citing the likes of Behemoth, Nile and Hate Eternal. Now while I do hear a nod to Behemoth here and there (namely42 seconds into opener “Rewriting Human Genetics”), it’s pretty obvious that Splattered Entrails are definitely not quite plying Nile and Hate Eternal styled death metal, but a form of ultra brutal slammy death metal that would be right at home on a label like Unique Leader/ Unmatched Brutality/ Sevared/Comatose,  along side bands like Human Parasite, Disgorge, Devourment, Katalepsy, Murder Intentions and such. It’s super down tuned, uber guttural and full of slams. Throw in the programmed drums, which further enhance the beefiness (and remaining strain of cyber tones)  and you get 35 minutes of pretty impressive and often devastatingly heavy, if sometimes synthetic sounding brutality.

Obviously the programmed drums give the album a lot of density, but the guitars also carry some weight as do O’Hara’s standard brutal death metal cavernous  growls, but above and beyond the sounds, the songs themselves are pretty solid for the genre. An expected mix of blasts and hefty slams make up the majority of the album, and it delivers both with satisfying results, especially the grooves and slams which, when mixed with the low end production can be particularly devastating as heard on “Humans:Deprogrammed” , Dying Fetus like “Bathyspheric Claustrophobia”,  and lurching closer  “Eliminating the Substructure”. However, it should be said that the blasty bits tend to sound a bit samey as the album wears on. That being said, O Hara shows that he can develop a song more fully with the almost 6- minute “Buried In Cement” and two other longer tracks “Dawn of the Great Plague” and ‘Reconstructing Nerve Fiber”. And as you can tell, O’Hara still seems a bit torn on his lyrical themes as he makes  the stylistic transition.

This release, plus the two new, solid releases from Human Infection and the UK’s Parasitized show that Blast Head Records are a promising newcomer in the brutal death metal field.

 

[Visit the band's website]

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