Ya gotta admire Dismember, I mean they're like a motherfucking shark: they never evolve, they never change, they picked one deadly shape and they're staying with it no matter what. Seven albums in, bridging the old wave and the new wave of Swedish Death, Dismember hitched up to the Entombed wagon back in 1988 and they aren't getting off.
If you love old-school Death Metal like Unleashed, old Entombed, Fleshcrawl, Paganizer, etc. (you get the idea), then this is a band you already know well. Dismember always deliver a straight-up Death Metal album, but this one is a bit better than some of their past efforts have been. The first time I spun it I thought it was a bit weak, as the guitar sound is a bit muted, and not as crunchy as I would like, but you just have to be in the mood for in-your-face Death to get this album's charm. There's nothing modern about this sound, hell, look at the tracklist – the guys had the stones to call a song "Autopsy" – you know a band has to be either really stupid or really good to pick a title as obvious as that.
This is the album I wanted from Dismember – a brutal, thirty-five minute assault of Death Metal so reactionary it's almost stone-age. This isn't the clickety-kick drum kind of brutal either, but the kind that comes from unswerving intensity. That said, Dismember do inject a surprising amount of melody into their Death Metal stew, without going Gothenburg in the slightest. An enjoyable album from a band who always stick to their guns.
