Carcass, their very name screams pure bloody metal. The British grindcore legends were favourites of the brilliant John Peel and reigned supreme in their original run between 1985 and 1995. Their return in 2007 was therefore greeted with glee while the announcement they were to write and record an album, which was released earlier this year. induced full blown delirium. With Daniel Wildling (Trigger the Bloodshed) coming in on drums and Ben Ash (Pig Iron) on guitar to join original original members Jeff Walker and Bill Steer Surgical Steel was created.
Opening with the almost compulsoury build up instrumental “1985” it’s hard not to feel hyped up as “Thrashers Abbatoir” comes crashing in. Unsurprisingly it’s heavy and it’s fast. Walker sounds fantastic as he growls his way through the vocals and the howls that accompany the track would send shivers down your spine if you heard them in a dark room. While the shouts of “Time to die, die in pain” are sure to become a live favourite. This relentless pace and fury never quite gives up, although there are some tracks that are a lot more riff laden later in the album, for example “316L Grade Surgical Steel” which has a really nice riff running underneath the entire thing.
This entire album is a relentless smashing of your head off a wall – in a good way – and it’s hard not to just want to punch the air, flip over a table and start a pit the second it kicks in. Walker sounds demented throughout the whole thing and they could be playing Justin Bieber tracks underneath his vocals and it would still sound heavy as fuck. In saying all that, there are also some fantastic bits of melody in here, generally coming from the guitar of Bill Steer. They are used sparingly and because of that have all the more impact. While “A Congeled Clot of Blood” has a possitvely slow section in the middle which see’s Steer puling out a fantastic solo while the drums and bass keep up a slow relentless backing. This means when the vocals come back in they feel all the heavier as the song builds back up to it’s climax. All of this is what makes Carcass stand out ahead of a lot of bands. They know that just because you write and perform extreme metal doesn’t mean you can ditch the entire idea of a song. These are tracks that have been crafted to get people to respond to them and if these tracks don’t make you want to fuck shit up you must have something wrong with you.
This isn’t going to be the most inventive album you will hear this year but my god is it a kick up the arse. Carcass are still as heavy, if not heavier than anything else on the market at the moment and when it comes to vocalists no one does it quite like Jeff Walker. I mean how can you not like an album with track names like “The Granulating Dark Satanic Mills”. Carcass are back and they still kick arse, so thank god for that.
For Fans of: Slayer, face melting metal
Choice cuts: all of it
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