Mindly Rotten - The Most Exquisite Agonies - Reviews

Mauricio Gallon - Guitar, Vocals
Carlos Mario Fisgativa - Bass, Vocals
Duverman Velásquez – Drums

Colombian civilization has been around since 10,000 BCE. The Spanish are their most notable conquers and from the 1940's to the early 1950's La Violencia claimed the lives of some 180,000 Colombians. Today homicides have been reduced by 48% and kidnappings have been reduced from 3,700 in 2000 to 1,441 in 2004. Still, a dichotomy exists between classes in Colombia, which is evident in crime statistics, human rights abuses, and ubiquitous drug smuggling. Mike, why the fuck are you giving me some damned history lesson in a review? Well, dummy, simple deduction is going to make you realize that an environment is partially responsible for an outcome. In the case of Mindly Rotten, I can almost guarantee that the historical information I provided in one capacity or another contributes to the Broootality of the music on their debut album, ‘The Most Exquisite Agonies'.

Mindly Rotten vicariously takes the listener on a lurid trip to the most demented carrion coated torture pit in Colombia. At first the music came across almost noisy to my ears, but then my earphones took me into another realm of Brutal Death Metal disfigurement. With the ease of a sharp knife piercing an abdomen I found myself wrapped in a debris filled tsunami of guitars, bass, drums, vocals, and flailing limbs. Caught in the fray are portent refrains, and riffs swirling in a wavelike barrage. Musically, Mindly Rotten are the delectable peanut debris spawned from the shit of bands like Brodequin, Internal Suffering, Pustulated, Purulent and Ancient Necropsy, but they seem to have found their own distinctiveness.

The drumming of Duverman Velásquez is a maze of blast beats, rolls, and hyperventilating. His style is reminiscent of Brodequin era Chad Walls bludgeoning mixed with the cocaine speed and tin can snare reverberation of Beto Martinez from Suppuration. Somewhere in the mix is Carlos Mario Fisgativa' down-tuned bass, which is subject to a few brief solo interludes, but mostly it adds more Angus style beef to the recording than Brokeback Mountain has tube steak scenes. While not as creative or clear sounding in riffing as Ivan Jaramillo of Ancient Necropsy, Mauricio Gallon is still a capable guitarist who packs as much nihilistic hatred as possible into each pick at a string. Viper quick guitar solos and licks abruptly penetrate ears with streamlined precision. Vocally the double attack of Mauricio and Carlos don't really add much to the music except for what my buddy/web-guru Kunal would call “ree-ing.” This perfunctory Brutal Death Metal vocal flare can be found with such bands as Blaze Inside, Liturgy and Beheaded among a myriad of other bands in the genre. Perhaps the “ree-ing” is derived from playing instruments while singing or possibly they just want to stick to a proven formula. Regardless, it is not too bad, and I found myself gleefully scaring gangster pussies off the road while blasting Mindly Rotten in my girlfriends modified Toyota Celica. Besides, where the vocals are routine, the cool guitar solos and licks are a welcome modification to a Brutal Death Metal genre that sometimes trips over the laces of its own insistence on being Broootal.

On ‘The Most Exquisite Agonies', Mindly Rotten may seem to come across as being straightforward or noisy. Yet, they have a subtle technicality to them that is certainly obvious to the experienced ear. While not up to the standard of bands like ‘None So Vile' era Cryptopsy, Psycroptic or Necrophagist, Mindly Rotten are certainly comparable to their Colombian counterparts Internal Suffering. More important is that in contrasting them with Internal Suffering it is worth recognizing that Mindly Rotten are as skilled now as Internal Suffering was on their second full length album ‘Chaotic Matrix', but with less of an early Kataklysm sound. Really what you get in Mindly Rotten is a passionately methodical thumb screwing filled with harmonies, motifs, and sheer capable brutality.

Were I a member of a group of elite Colombian kidnappers that had taken hostage a rain forest killing oil tycoon and his trophy wife, I'd play Mindly Rotten daily as I sodomized them with both ends of a baseball bat and a bottle of mace. I would keep them awake to the point of insanity on pure cocaine, and hire diseased villagers to anally train the wife. Yeah, ‘The Most Exquisite Agonies' is twisted shit and all you future abductors, drug cartel smugglers, serial murders, and rapists should get this disc immediately. By the way, I found Mindly Rotten to be good accompaniment music for sex, masturbation, zit popping, and beating my friends retard kid for constantly drooling.