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RANCID CADAVER
Flesh Monstrosity EP

Dry Cough (2022)
Rating: 9/10

In the wake of Putrid Fate’s debut EP, Feast On Flesh, comes fellow Scottish deathsters Rancid Cadaver.

Here you are treated to five extremely heavy tunes featuring some of the deepest, barbaric bellows I’ve heard for a while, and as soon as the title track hits you’re dragged into some truly ugly, downtuned quagmire of doom-laden percussion and a gnawing, bleak guitar tone.

Thankfully, this slow, pulverising theme continues with the immense, squalid ooze of ‘Bog Rot’, a grinding heap of sludgy compost that sucks you down into its organic depths.

In a genre where so many bands are aiming for a similar style of fetid, ghoulish echoes, Rancid Cadaver has something slightly different to offer, an unfathomable and grotesque slow shift that drains the life out of you with its paralysing weight.

Maniacal solos scurry through the peat and chugging riffage plough great furrows of morbidity while bass and drums act as clogged, soiled arteries, churning up the quicksand and depositing it in every orifice.

‘Malignant Affliction’ brings pace to proceedings, blowing the dew-damp webs away with vile gusts of mechanized gnashing before some truly sombre doom sighs creak and groan. Meanwhile, ‘Dragged Beneath’ couldn’t have a more apt title; existing in misery and wading through congealed soot. Here the drums lumber, entangled with that thick, dense bass.

Finally, closer ‘Genetic Enhancement’ chugs in sinister fashion with the vocals acting as cavernous growls commanding the stodgy slurry to encompass the listener. Eventually the combo seems to collapse into a pit of despair, their mighty cess-pit of musty death metal solidifying them as the new kings of the castle.

This is brilliantly crushing Scottish death metal, deeper and glossier than Loch Ness but as equally mesmerising and mystical macabre.

Neil Arnold

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