Rating: 6.0

Country: Australia

Release Date: 2007

Record Label: Obsidian Records

Track list:
1.Rise of the Rotted 03:48
2.Hell Shall be thy Name 03:33
3.Delimbed by the Minions 04:54
4.Relentlessly Beheaded 01:58
5.A Lust to Burn 03:07
6.Crush All Things Living 02:24
7.Punish Prophecy 03:18
8.Man Shall Abolish 10:56

Total playing time 33:58

Band Website: Limb from Limb

Limb from Limb - Rip Him from His Fucking Throne

Sacha Yarrow - guitars
Brent Waddups - vocals
Dave Jensen - bass
Will Magnusson - Guitar
Simon Goudcamp - Drums

A moniker that reminds me of somethin' by Exhumed and an album title that sounds like some extremely vitriolic, sweary Black Metal. What's this then? It's the debut release by this Brutal Death Metal act from Australia, featurin' members of Excruciate, Necrosculpture, Devolved and Internecine Excoriation. Any good?

After the portentous intro, we get shoved face-first into a piercingly cold, earsplittin' blizzard, it's full of squallsome, vacuum-packed riff-sqiuggle, blastular drum flurry and corrosive vokill vehemence. The songs bring about rather a blackened, volatile atmosphere, movin' swiftly from aggressive downstrokes on palm-muted string-blockery with rapidly performed, insectoid riff figures crowbarred in between them, before they deliver their crunchy stop-start bombardment, which usually involves cloutin' your ears with a percussive, melody-free section consistin' of a very blunt riff chopped into several weighty segments, afore returnin' to the higher freq riff-squirl. Despite their excessive speeds, the drums remain tight 'n' poised throughout, retainin' their kick-heavy punch and snare-laden snap, but their oft incongruous arrangement, although givin' it a chaotic feel, sometimes contradicts the songs a bit, especially when they reach a slower, lurchin' bit, 'cos the blasts continue to rattle along regardless. Other than that, the rhythm section is imposin', solid and jaw-droppingly robust. The vox are very good, goin' from moist gut-squash pukement, through husky guttural roars, up to bile-soaked glottal snarls.

Unfortunately, the songs don't seem to draw me in very far, and after the first two spins my attention seemed to have evaded all but the openin' track completely. The band are obviously very accomplished performers, who've honed their skills to the sharpness of a lethal chrome harpoon and buffed their performance of their convoluted tunes to an extremely high level of polish, but the songs are just so clinical that they don't allow me to get into them very much at all. The initial impact is achieved by the incredibly harsh, dissonant textures created by the high-speed riffing, but this quickly fades as the material rattles on, becomin' more and more unappealin' as it goes. Granted, the songs have a labyrinthine quality, but the bits don't appear to be pieced together in such a way that when they I might enjoy this more in the right frame of mind, perhaps if I wanted to challenge my head to become absorbed by this downright impenetrable whirl of blasts and riffs whilst sittin' on a bus, but it's certainly not BBQ music.

Some of this reminded me of new stuff by the expertly produced but thoroughly uninspirin' Hate Eternal, crossed with the dullest Deeds of Flesh ditties from recent times, perhaps whatever takes didn't make Crown of Souls rather than anything from the exquisite Reduced to Ashes, plus a few dried out chunks of Cryptopsy. Elsewhere, I could hear the plainest parts of later Gorgasm, the blandest bits of Insidious Decrepancy and maybe sped-up, less-good sections of Seeds of Abysmal Torment by Fleshgrind, along with generous splashes of Deathened Black Metal like recent Behemoth or maybe Angelcorpse.

Production is a bit of a strange one. The guitar is wrung out in such a way that they plaster lots and lots of migranous high-frequencies all over your tympanic membranes, givin' them a jagged metal snow-plough quality, but then placed at such a position in the mix that it sounds like it's always just around the corner. Drums seem to have all the life thoroughly triggered out of them, but the vox sound nice and rich and are in a good, commandin' position in the middle o' the mix, and attempt to drag everything together.

Cover art? Skulls, graves, spikes, horns, crows. A thrown-together package of dark imagery that undermines the amount of work that has clearly gone into the compositions. The lyrics are ok, but they're mainly just dramatic scenes of violence, death, war and murder narrated with coarse language and key Black Metal words, so they come across as quite tongue-in-cheek. A few quick samples for you: "Enwrapped in black on my forehead the cross is inverted", "Fuck you fuck your lives, all you fucks will die, our swords and axes will ensure your demise," "The circle of candles and its inhabitants, beg and evoke his thousand year sleep," "It's over you cocksuckers, we win, that's it!" Hoho!

I didn't enjoy this much. Maybe after a few more listens it'll manage to carve its way into my brain rather than just repeatedly bashin' into my eardrums. It's of a nice length for quick re-listens, the total playin' time is just under thirty five minutes, but the last song is ten minutes of ominous, rumbly outro, so this is more of an EP really. Worth a listen so you can hear their multi-coiled tunes and ultra-clenched performance.

June 13th, 2008