The first time I heard Carcass, it scared the shit outta me. It was unlike anything I had heard before. At the tender age of eighteen, I did not know what to make of this unholy gurgling, vomiting, stench of mess. I tell ya, listening to Reek Of Putrefaction was the equivalent of watching Henry:Portrait of a Serial Killer. I felt dirty, gross and just wanted to take a shower afterwards. And talk about songs titles, this band had it all….from “Regurgitation of Giblets”, to “Crepitating Bowel Erosion”, and “Swarming Vulgar Mass of Infected Virulency”.
Carcass may have been lumped in with other bands in the death metal genre, but they were unlike any of their peers at the time. From first listen of the early Carcass records, it may sound like the flushing of an over filled toilet, but after a few spins it all starts to make sense. You then figure out the choruses behind the grind and youre hooked for life. Some of my death metal friends give me grief for calling Carcass a “hard rock” band. I give them the term out of respect, cause if you take the static grind out from the face of the tunes, you get catchy as hell songs that you can sing to…well if you ever memorise the complex medical dictionary lyrics.
Bands like Carcass also never had to rely on throwing blast beats into the whole song, instead they used it when it was necessary, this could not be said with most death metal bands back then, and even now. Carcass was all about bringing feel & aura to the mix, not just an endless, buzzing, repetitive wall of noise.
One of the great things also about Carcass was that unlike most other death metal bands, the band did not have a very high turnover rate of musicians coming and going. It was for the most part a stable line up of Jeff, Bill, Michael, and Ken. So many bands have tried to take from Carcass’s sick, pungent recipe, but have failed miserably in recreating the vomit inducing sounds of the true gore kings. Carcass is one rotting corpse who’s stench never gets old.
