Last Days of Humanity - Putrefaction In Progress

William - Guitar
Marc - Drums
Rogier - Bass
Hans - Vocals

Putrefaction In Process sounds like a retrieved recording of a ritualistic tribal event taken place at a clandestine location where hordes of savage blood smeared men bang their drums manically to invoke their indescribable beast of worship, who invariably makes a smashing entry out the foliage and into the pit full of skulls and bones, towards the centre of which lay a towering mass of festering meat kept solely for his appeasement. For about the next half hour, to the heightened beatings of its worshippers, you hear this huge abominable creature bounding about noisily in the pit, constantly grunting and snarling, tearing and munching its meat with mannerless slobbering while you as the dumbstruck witness to the sounds in your posh bedroom are steadily mounting on a pile of faeces engendered by your lower body either out of fright or excitement.

Clearly, it is an experience not everyone can stomach. For this is goregrind of the most extreme form conceivable. And no, it is not a gimmick by some wannabe band but the final album by the renowned Dutch grinders Last Days of Humanity whose recent musical outputs are a far pitch-shifted cry from their early slushy and groovy style of goregrind. I would advise those of you who had to visit a neuro-oncologist after listening to their In Advanced Haemorrhaging Conditions EP to go book a spot in your local graveyard before attempting to experience this album. That's because Putrefaction In Process is the real unabridged thing, lasting for an interminable 25 minutes as opposed to mere seven minutes of their dangerous EP, which in comparison serves only as a trailer for this murderer of an album. There is absolutely no respite to be found from their tireless jackhammer blasting. Forget taking solace in intros like you did last time; this album has none. The only breather is the second or two long gap between the end of one song and the start of another, making you feel as if your head has been raised from a violently flushing toilet bowl for just long enough for you to gasp. By the end of this torture session you are doomed to turn into an inanimate lump of flesh, leaving open two plausible lines of reasoning – either you are dead or your body is too numb from the beating to react to it.

What you hear on this album is the aggravation of the bare elements of goregrind. It features nondescript vocals that are capable of emanating only from of the throat of the kind of bloodthirsty monster that I described earlier, the rabid creation of indistinct putrid tunes by the guitarists and the all too palpable hyper-battering of the tinny snare drums, which is like the door of a suspended shipping container overhead suddenly giving way, leading to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of steel pipes falling on your head in rapid succession. A few groovy parts that manage to spring up are however summarily killed by this tempestuous drumming. Such extreme "music" that's been played for so long with its kind of unwavering consistency doesn't usually get high marks in my book, but Putrefaction In Process is unparalleled in its musical extremity and the debilitiating experience it offers.

Putrefaction In Process is bound to create a gaping rift through the group of people who claim to listen to this form of music. Only those who have a heart pumping cancerous blood for them or a head embedded with a metal plate or one with a helmet on top of it will be left standing. The rest of the wimps will perish, but not before being shamefully exposed. Last Days of Humanity, the chosen band to have prematurely brought upon us the dreaded Judgement Day have ended their illustrious career in a truly heroic style – choosing the most extreme album of their discography to be their swan song.

Last Days of Humanity are dead! Long live Last Days of Humanity!

August 15th, 2007