Severe Torture - Misanthropic Carnage

Misanthropic Carnage is Severe Torture’s sophomore follow-up to their highly acclaimed debut, Feasting on Blood. This album was what put them as being one of the masters of the death grind genre with Dying Fetus, Cattle Decapitation, Misery Index, Carcass, and Exhumed. For those of you that are already aware of how Severe Torture’s first album sounds, they didn’t really change the sound much in this album except turn up the brutality a couple of notches. The lineup on this album isn’t any different on this album, so that means whatever improvements and/or deteriorations the members have made.

When you talk about brutality, there are the brutal bands that use certain types of guitar distortion and manipulate the volumes and sounds of the different instruments, and there are brutal bands that actually write fucking brutal music that doesn’t need enhancements. But, there are some bands that write some of the most brutal music out there AND turn up the bass and guitar distortion and make other changes here and there to make it sound even MORE brutal. Misanthropic Carnage is an album that has the brutal music without all the other major effects and production work. In other words, this album has an extremely raw sound, which is part of why these guys remind me so much of Dying Fetus.

Are there any improvements present? I would say so! The first thing that I noticed is that the drums are MUCH more solid and sound a lot more confident (yes, drums have feelings too). The blast beats are much faster and more complex than average, and the fact that there’s no reverb or any special effects on the drums make them sound extremely technical. The kick drums don’t have any bass at all, they sound like someone tapping chopsticks on the dinner table. Most of the time, you can’t even hear the kick drums because they don’t have any bass or volume; but the rest of the drum set has a good amount of volume.

The guitars are very generic to the death grind standards and stay true to the traditional sound without much experimentation or excessive technicality. Just like in Feasting on Blood, the bass guitar is where all the technicality is. First of all, the bassist plays at an incredible speed with an incredible level of complexity. What he plays varies from following the guitars to going really slow and simple to being outright crazy and technical. There are several places where he has solos made up of pure slapping that get people’s attention. The lower frequencies on his bass are turned way down with the midrange and the treble turned up to give the music an even more raw sound (as well as to match up with how the other instruments sound).

This is a fantastic album that I would recommend to all Dying Fetus fans and fans of death grind and brutality in general. I would give this album 17/20 for being an amazing and solid follow-up to their awesome debut.