I was surprised to see this dirty great cankerous manifestation of an album had yet to be reviewed here, so what better time than now to fill that glaring void. You have to admire Dismember, they've never strayed far from their original blueprint, even if that original blueprint borrowed heavily from their bigger, hairier brother (Entombed). Even in the pre-Dismember days (when most of the band played in Carnage with Michael Amott), these guys were obviously digging heavily on the pre-Entombed band Nihilist. However, with all the early influence from their metal brethren, there is still a immense amount of innovation here (I mean, rip-off copycat artists wouldn't be able to continue releasing quality albums one after the other for nearly twenty years could they? Well, yeah probably... but you know what I mean).
No true fan of death metal can deny the instant classics this album contains ('Bleed for Me', 'Skin Her Alive'... what am I doing listing tracks? The whole fucking album is a classic). Album opener 'Override of the Overture' starts with a slow pounding drum, a trickling stream and soulless screams of the dead and dying trapped in purgatory... before that instantly recognizable Tomas Skogsberg/Sunlight Studios guitar sound rips a hole in the space time continuum and your head at the same time. Far away from the tap-dancing typewriter drums of a lot of modern death metal, Fred Estby batters the fuck out of his kit, and you can hear every creak, crack and rattle of it - the way it's meant to be. Strangulated guitars race for the finish line, entwining around the listener like some flesh eating plant, with hired hand Nicke Andersson (then of Entombed, now of Death Breath), ripping out flailing leads left, right and centre like a cat-o-nine tails, rending flesh and necks alike. It is however the vocal performance of Matti Karki that holds together the album, with a bullish, gritty and sore-throated bellow - you can almost hear his eyes bulging from their sockets and the phlegm saturating the microphone cover as he spills forth his tales of death, destruction and mutilation.
So, there we have it. Yet another archetypal album from a time when things were fresh and free from the stagnation which blights a lot of the genre these days. Hell, even the fantastic Dan Seagrave artwork adds to its un-nerving dark mystique. A bona fide Swedish death metal classic.
