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CEREBRAL ROT
Excretion Of Mortality

20 Buck Spin (2021)
Rating: 9.5/10

Emerging from the swamps of gore and drenched in algae is Seattle, Washington-based Cerebral Rot, one of my favourite death metal bands doing the rounds who return with this eagerly awaited second full-length heap.

The garish cover art screams with horror as the combo rumbles into the seven-minute title track on bleak, butchering chords fed on human fat and organs as bile-coated words of splatter leak onto decrepit riffs amidst a tidal wave of percussive purulence.

This is utterly fetid death metal that grows on you like a blubbery cyst that eventually bursts and drowns you in its pustular perversity. Immense rhythms just ooze like festering goo before wild passages of blood-soaked hammering conjure waterfalls of bubbling contagion.

Cerebral Rot provides some of the most unnatural, guzzling cacophony known to man to the point where I’m hereby convinced that this is an otherworldy tome of terror. This is the soundtrack to a vision of pus-filled sores, quagmires of steaming Hell, quicksand excrement and boneyards of boiling creeks lined with corroded bones chewed by acidic insects.

Everything about the title track is pungent – rotting from the inside, and not boding well for the rest of the clamour to come. Brace yourself then for the hammering pistons of piss-filled ‘Vile Yolk Of Contagion’, a churning, sickening swab of meathook malevolence that creeps with radiation sickness before immersing itself in some steaming geyser of gas and gore. This is slow – painfully slow – dripping, leaking, heaving and lumbering, weighed down by its own tumours and creaking bones as a fizzing riff emerges from the pile of innards to combat the hissing manic percussion, while flecks of Carcass and their medically-attuned grind dredge the lake of bodily fluids.

‘Spewing Purulence’ chugs with menace, choking on its own cancers and smoke, inhaling mouldy spores to enable these sorry vocals to burp like wisps of infected lung clots. How does this band manage to cough out such gnashing tides of sewage?

‘Bowels Of Decrepitude’ is probably the fastest track on offer. But any rapid surges are made sodden by that dank air of the macabre, the band hammering on through the lagoons of ooze and luminous tar as early Bolt Thrower comes to mind with those clanking, mid-paced chimes. And let’s not forget the Demilich and Rottrevore vibes. But while influences are clear, Cerebral Rot has taken death metal to new, boggy extremes of barbarity. The misery of Autopsy provides extra malevolence in that dull, thudding bass, while a putrid air of Finnish quality escapes from the haze like some foul, stomach eroding flatulence.

‘Drowned In Malodor’ disgusts with its suffocating odour, where the percussion clanks like the rattle of butcher hooks awaiting the next flayed pig. The pace quickens but the fog thickens around it. Meanwhile, ‘Retching Innards’ chugs, billowing rotten gas as it ploughs the mud to unearth splintered skeletons; the guitars just gnashing at the bones and leaving foamy furrows.

The hideous album closer ‘Crowning The Disgustulent (Breed Of Repugnance)’ leaks a suspenseful trickle into the ears and battery acid fills the eardrums and worms its way into the canal to bore into the brain and cause an effervescing much of gloop to erupt. A mighty riff cascades, the drums plod and plunder, and more sewage runs in rivers to provide a deluge of morose, morbid contamination, before that hefty chug evokes images of clenching, rusty blades and body parts strewn and cast aside.

‘Crowning…’ is an epic finale – a final act of lumbering butchery that seals this toxic tomb with its own fumes of marsh gas. As faster segments meander, they are soon bludgeoned back into place by the walls of thickening, congealing gore to a point of total coagulation, and eventual death for the sorry listener who dared traipse through the dregs.

Long after your flesh and organs are reduced to pulp and your bones as ash, Cerebral Rot’s fetid latest foul stench lingers on the soil like pea-soup fog.

Neil Arnold

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