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PEAK OF PUTREFACTION
By Graham Rae
In July 1988, the first album by English hardgore death
metal band Carcass was released, Reek of Putrefaction. I loved it the minute it
came out, and listened to it constantly. A messy, psychotic, riotous
death-vomit of an album, it had a cover with photos of real dead people on it,
which is pretty tacky and horrible, really, but when I was 18 I was much more
accepting of such stuff. Subterranean woundsounds and screaming, sludgy vocals;
magic. And as for song titles like Psychopathologist, Manifestation of
Verrucose Urethra, Oxidised Razor Masticator, Genital Grinder, Vomited Anal Tract,
and Excreted Alive…ah, poignant lifesick teenage poetry! I sneaked a wee ref to
their second album, Symphonies of Sickness (the original cover of which is a
photo somebody with their head split in half with an axe upside down; had to
ask the band what it was), into my released-next-month novel Soundproof Future
Scotland, just as a…salute.
Their first extreme mutilation sonic splatter platter fit
right in with my teenage love of extreme music and movies and books (the month
after this album came out I would discover Nekromantik; I was reading early
Clive Barker and splatterpunk stuff at the time), and I just couldn’t get
enough of it. I met one of the band, Bill Steer, in Edinburgh at The Venue,
after a Napalm Death gig, and remember him as being a shy teen (he’d be around
19 at the time; he’s 3 months younger than me) who stood looking at the floor
as he talked with his long fair hair covering his face. The band knew my work
from Deep Red, and I gave Shane Embury (whom I recall supplying with bootleg
splatter videos back in the day) an encyclopedia of serial killers to get into
the Grindcrusher Tour when it was in Edinburgh on November 11th, 1989.
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This tour was run by the record label Earache, and featured
the bands Morbid Angel (Shane gleefully telling me to watch out for their
guitarist’s spot of self-mutilation at the start of every gig “to get himself
going”), Bolt Thrower (who always seemed to be playing every other week in the
late 80s at The Venue, a now-sadly-defunct great wee, well, venue, by Waverley
Station in Edinburgh), Napalm Death and, of course, Carcass. They showed a huge
screen with real dead bodies on it behind them as they played. Subtle. Who said
theatre was dead, eh? Steer told me at the time that Psychopathologist was one
of his fave Carcass songs, after I casually mentioned that it was one of mine.
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I recently sat down and listened to Reek of Putrefaction on
headphones, and started to write about it as a Facebook post after it had been
on for about 10 minutes. All of a sudden I found myself writing a transcription
of what the album sounded like to me, finishing when it did. I just love
sitting writing fast and automatic and without thinking or editing, one take
straight through, gutterly stunconscious, and the wordspurt below is what came
out. So, enjoy. Must admit, I’d love to hear the band re-record this with
today’s technology. And do listen to the album if you like old school sonic
mayhem. At the time this came out, there had been nothing like it in the
history of music, and it was cutting fucking edge. At that cutting edge still
cuts today.
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| jeff walker, bill steer and ken owen |
PUTREFACTION ACTION
You know the GREAT thing about this album? The engineer
totally messed it up when it was being recorded, so it sounds, apparently,
completely wrong. But I think the poor recording actually ENHANCES it. It's a
lumbering, shambolic sludgy noise puddle just splashing and slashing in all
directions at one, barely staying together tunewise, with beautifully horrible
strange adipoceric oases of music bursting through the skanky prurient filth,
precise carved gutter-guitar and bass and drum-beaten howling islands of
comprehensible sound, split seconds of linearity, moments of clarity,
pterodactyl screeches of too-high earache guitar, wallowing in insane
unprecedented death-blood-horror-gorged baths of guts and psychosis-purebred
sonic madness, gleefully revelling in vile human misery, unstoppable death
train on greased tracks, modern band cannibals round a campfire
neon-illuminated by guttering windblown flesh-smelling flames with blood and
gore dripping dementedly down their human-masticating chins, empty split
carcasses of dreamy bellyful food comas, charges of the tired-of-light brigade,
two-sec guitar so-low solos firecrackers of vague competency screaming up from
the hollow caustic depths of maggot-ridden despair to disappear, horrific
serial killer grunts and groans of curious volition murdering notes and tunes
and civilised grace and sanity and dignity and elegance, replacing them with a
long-lost primal earthy banter fury, skinsoundpounding thunderground
breakbeats, broadcasts from an advance snarling musical camp of slaughterhouse
laughter, manic depressing maniac skilling sprees, howling and licking the
headphone-covered ears with malicious seditious hatefueled glee, bloodburps of
absolute pure fury purity, running running running towards some ruinous glutted
end point of terminal anthropophagous velocity, chewing up and spitting out all
olde-worlde music and tunes and notes and stanzas and swansongs, the certain
death of the old and rebirth in a fiery sanguinary bloodflood of placenta and
amniotic songstorm to fly new and bruising and disturbing round the
confused-listener room, semi-coagulated half-hard symphonies of sickness
slipslapsplatdripdropping off the inhospitable hospital table to pool in
advanced-brilliance-glittering depthless shallow mudblood puddles of band
guignol, temples of doom and despair and decay and disease and dis-ease and
dementia 13 ways until a never-coming next Tuesday, always winding up new
blinding modes of wreckspression, sanity suppression, inexactly tabulated
recordings of a tense dense terse new expressive chaos and murder of thousands
of years of senseless consensus morality and reality, intimate intimations of
reality, threats of sensitive violence, soft sibilant blood-hisses in the
wailing despairing ear, inexorable push-and-shove-to-the-front of the terminus
line, lemmings over the cliff of permanent extinction, extinguishing anguish in
one swift knifestab of killing joke trajectory, rollercoasters of death
crashing and gushing guts and graphic gore all over a once-funhouse-rejoicing
theme park of now-contaminated atmosfear, random instrumentals muscling to the
front of the aural house to be bleeder of the pack rats hoarding nothing but
holocausts of infinite destruction, deathpurr shockrockability crashing and
burning all over eighteen tons of superhighways of album-and-crashing sex
deaths, final deep death metal breath and fade...to...blackout.
DEAD END
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