Gortuary-Manic Thoughts of Perverse Mutilation

I only have a couple more reviews left in my review series of extremely underground brutal death bands. One of the bands I almost completely forgot about was Gortuary. These brutal meat-grinders crawled out of the crypts deep within San Diego, California. I’m not aware of any activity outside of California, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they have played in Washington or Oregon before. Although I wouldn’t agree to this at all, this album has been labeled as the most brutal album of all time. I will be reviewing the most brutal album of all time at the very end of my brutal metal review series.

For those of you eager sickos that have already decided to check out the album, you can easily tell that this is traditional brutal death that is meant to be played while you’re chopping people up. For some reason, people keep thinking that whenever I say Gortuary that I’m actually trying to say Goratory, which is a much more popular band that I’m not at all familiar with yet. But that aside, let’s look at this monster of an album.

My favorite thing about this album is the sound of the drums. If you haven’t already noticed, the sound of the drums can really turn me on to album, but they can also completely ruin it for me. In this case, the drums have one of the most unique sounds I’ve heard in the brutal music scene. All of the drums have a “pop” sound with kind of a wispy sound added to it; it’s one of those things that you have to hear it to know what I mean. So my favorite song off the record is definitely Skull Fragments. The cymbals aren’t overpowering at all, and the kickdrums have a really clicky sound that since it isn’t too loud, it sounds great.

Inhaled vocals….again. I’m going to let this guy off easy cause they sound really nasty and awesome, but seriously, just about every album I’ve reviewed in this underground brutal metal series has had inhaled vocals, which is something that gets old pretty damn quickly. Maybe someday I’ll learn to appreciate it more like some of you guys out there, but it aint happening for me right now. Gortuary is one of those bands that like to put random recordings at the beginning of some of their songs. One of them is of Larry the Cable Guy at the beginning of Splatter Fecal Matter, very appetizing don’t you think?

So while the vocalist is going on about killing people with meat grinders, there is a lot of hard work being done by the bassist and the lead guitarist on figuring out the music part. There isn’t a lot of high-pitched action taking place in the guitar parts; the guitarists and the bassist have their instruments tuned really low which is what is the key to the ultimate brutal sound. Other than that, there isn’t really much else to say about this album. There aren’t many faults, but the album really isn’t something too special. But after comparing it to all the other brutal death shit I've heard SO FAR (it hasn't been much), this album in retrospect is more than satisfying after all the crap I've heard. This gets 16/20.