Gutted - Human Race Deserves to Die

I mentioned in my review of Gutted’s first album that they were one of the best death grind bands I’d heard since Cattle Decapitation first reached my ears. If you haven’t read my review of Defiled, I would recommend reading it before you read this one (click the album title, it’s a link). So after reading that, you now know that I FUCKING LOVED Defiled and that I almost instantly got their other two albums. To be honest, Human Race Deserves to Die isn’t any less impressive than Defiled. Actually, let me rephrase that: just like Defiled, this album doesn’t have any negative elements whatsoever, BUT if I had to choose between the two, I would choose Defiled because that one tends to speak to me with more originality and color.

One thing that bothers me is what was done during the production process of the album. I noted in my review of Defiled that one of my favorite things about it was the obvious amount of goddamn energy. Well, I can hear the musicians playing with the same intensity in this record, but the way everything is tuned really lowers the intensity in the overall sound of the music. The guitars don’t have as loud of a distortion as I would like, the vocals take a little TOO MUCH of a front-row-seat, and the bassist shouldn’t be as much in the background.

But in some ways, the production work has intensified some of the elements. For example, the vocals have a very deep and hollow sound similar to the growls on Aborted’s Strychnine.213 record. Except the hollowness of the growls on this album is much more extreme than on Strychnine.

After FINALLY tracking down and talking to some other Gutted fans over the internet in order to get other people’s opinion on the band, there were two specifics that they (myself included) loved about this band. The first thing was their drummer. I did a tiny bit of research on the drummer to see if he was in some huge technical death band, but Gutted is the only professional band that he’s ever been in! Now, logically speaking, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest bit if there were hordes of drummer-less European tech death bands contacting this guy asking for him to be their drummer. Unfortunately, this is the album where you can hear the drummer’s technicality the LEAST. The way the drums sound in Defiled and Mankind Carries the Seeds of Hell make them sound like a technical death band that’s mixed death grind into their music! But if you’re someone who’s used to listening to albums with wonky sound, you shouldn’t have any problem at all hearing the complexity in the drumming.

Another thing that I’ve heard people mention when talking about Gutted is more of a unique quality than anything else. Almost every single member of the band does vocals. No, that doesn’t just mean that the other members only join in all at once for one or two verses in every song; each of them actually get some time under the main spotlight! Of course, those moments are at least somewhat brief, because the unique gutturals (no pun intended) of the lead vocalist are the ones you hear the most, which brings up the possibility of the other members having large amounts of effects in order to make them sound more like the lead vocalist. But because I don’t know for sure (nor am I interested), I’m not going to take the time to make false accusations off of virtually no evidence at all. Because three of The Beatles figured out how to all sound (99.9999999999%) the same while singing. I’ve never HEARD of that kind of thing being done with death metal vocals, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.

The sophomore release by the Hungarian death grind group Gutted amazes me ALMOST as much as their debut, which means that Defiled wasn’t a fluke; these motherfuckers are for real. And from the sounds of their third album (which is also an amazing album), they have a hell of a lot more to deliver to the world. But unfortunately, if they keep sticking to the pattern they’ve been following of releasing an album every four years, we (sadly) won’t be hearing anything new from them until 2014. This is Gutted’s second album and after you get their first album (Defiled) and listen to it, I would HIGHLY recommend this (and the rest of Gutted’s discography) to all fans of brutal death, technical death, death grind, and just death metal in general! I would give this juicy slab of death grind 16/20.