Rating: 7.5

Country: Sweden

Release Date: 2004

Record Label: Brutal Bands

Track list:
1. Molding Through Sloth
2. Devouring Deficiency
3. Red Worms Erected
4. Facial Skin and Tissue Removal
5. Trans Gender Mutilation
6. Disgorging Pieces of Broken Glass [MP3]
7. Divine Gluttony
8. Morgue Abductions
9. Unspeakable Perversions
10. Aqualung

Total playing time: 27:11

Band Website: Stabwound

Stabwound - Human Boundaries

Per Ahre - Guitar, Vocals
Viktor Linder - Drums, Vocals
Fredrik Linfjard - Guitar, Bass, Vocals
Mikka Häkki - Bass
Uffe Nylin - Vocals

Ouch. This CD sounds rather like a blunt object covered in little sharp bits hitting you over the head. It's sick, violent and clinically precise at the same time. Sure, that terminology could be used to describe a lot of stuff, but it's painfully appropriate for Stabwound's one and only full length album. Clocking it at the usual sub-half-hour length, the band bashes their way through 10 tracks of downtuned, guttural sickness, with a thick, powerful sound optimized for extreme violence. Every instrument is crystal clear, the drums having been blessed with a proper EQ job which allows the bass-drums to actually pulverize instead of merely clicking away in the background. There's plenty of mixing up between intense blasting and crushing midpaced chunk riffs, with a bit of a hardcore influence poking through in the latter sections.

Naturally, Stabwound have opted to go for the “tortured farmyard animals” approach to vocals. For all their sick perversity, the lyrics are reduced to reading material only, as the vocalist abandons all diction in favour of a litany of grunts, inhaled pig-squeals and choked gurgled vomiting. Much in the path set down by Lord Worm of Cryptopsy, there's absolutely no point trying to read along with the words, because you'll get lost after half a verse. It doesn't matter how hard you try, even the most simple line of lyrics comes out as “blurgh urghhh eek eek urrrrgh bleeeech”. It's best to just ignore the lyrics (which are the usual sexual gore perversion and violent death stuff, including a lovely ditty about a man's crotch being devoured by tapeworms. Splendid.) and let the vocals roll over you like a tank. Too bad they couldn't keep the band together, but at least Stabwound has left this festering wound pressed to plastic to remind us that Sweden is still capable of creating some utterly disgusting death metal insanity.

June 1st, 2005