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Disembowelment: Disembowelment
03/09/09 || Khlysty
Of all the early death metal bands that I know, Australia’s Disembowelment (or, better, diSEMBOWELMENT, as the band preferred writing its name) seems to be like a well-kept secret among the death aficionados, spoken about in reverent tones in really underground circles and never really mentioned when one speaks about the stone age of said genre. I don’t know why this happens; I mean, fuck, they were on a pretty good label (Relapse) and they were recording they first works when death metal was flourishing all around the world.
Of course, the band had its own idiosyncrasies in music and general approach towards “show-biz” and they split really fast (in 1993 they were already gone, without even having played own fucking live show); but I think that what really sets disembowelment apart from their peers is the fact that their music was too bizarre to be easily accepted by an audience that was rooting for the “harder, brutaler, faster” attitude that was the rule of thumb back in the early days of death metal.
See, diSEMBOWELMENT had a tendency of creating long, convoluted pieces of music that combined incredible brutality with an almost transcendental melodic approach that was, and still is, quite difficult to stomach. To boot, the songs contained in the first disk of this nifty two-cd retrospective of the band’s work, which is their only L.P., called “Transcendence Into The Peripheral” (1993), are as crazy-ass as death metal can get: recorded with an almost cavernous production, they combine blastbeat-ridden, downtuned-to-fuck-and-back parts with introspective segues of clean melodic single-note-picking and drone-y guitar fuckery that, at first, seems totally haphazard and forbidding. Add to that, acoustic songs with soft-spoken-word vocals by a female (of the species) and some really sloth-moving songs and what you got is a fucking cipher.
So, to enjoy diSEMBOWELMENT, one has to understand them first. To get their crazily experimental nature, their love for bizarre guitar-bass-drums interactions, their almost poetic lyrics sung in the deepest possible death growl, their penchant for funereal doom passages that lead into speedy slaughters, only to return again to the slower-than-glacier pacing –not as breathing space, but as a fucking vice that compresses the listener to pulp. Those demented Aussies really went to the deep end of their chosen genre and what they found there was terrifying and miraculous at the same time. The fact that the band could not last the weight of its own creation hints to what those guys –probably even unknowingly- achieved within the short life-span of the band.
The second disk contains their first E.P., called “Dusk” (1992), plus five songs from their first demo and one song from the “Pantalgia” comp. The production values are even more problematic and lo-fi than those of the L.P., so that the songs that found their way into “Transcendence Into The Peripheral” sound very different and much more brutish. But, even under these conditions, the band’s quirks and ticks are already present, albeit buried under sludge and dirty noise. This disk acts more like a document from which one can see how the band evolved and where it went, while containing some experimental forays that are quite welcome, even if they underline the band’s dementia and left-brained approach towards death metal.
Anyway, the bottom line of all this is that diSEMBOWELMENT’s oeuvre still remains one of the towering achievements of death metal’s early days. I think that these two disks contain more that a bunch of songs written by some Aussie disenfranchised boys who liked to scare their neighbors: within these songs one will find a treasure of seminal ideas that later on would be expanded upon by other bands, giving death metal the ugly, misshapen form that we all see and adore today. Essential listen.
- Information
- Released: 2005
- Label: Relapse
- Website: diSEMBOWELMENT MySpace
- Band
- Renato Gallina: vocals, guitar
- Paul Mazziotta: drums
- Matthew Skarajew: bass
- Jason Kells: guitar
- Tony Mazziotta: double bass, track 7, disc 1
- I’da: vocals, track 4, disc 1
- Tim Aldridge: bass, track 4, disc 2
- Dean Ruprich: bass, tracks 5 – 9, disc 2
- Tracklist
DISK 1 (Transcendence Into The Peripheral): - 01. The Tree of Life and Death
- 02. Your Prophetic Throne of Ivory
- 03. Excoriate
- 04. Nightside of Eden
- 05. A Burial at Ornans
- 06. The Spirits of the Tall Hills
- 07. Cerulean Transience of All My Imagined Shores
DISK 2 (Dusk E.P.): - 01. The Tree of Life and Death
- 02. A Burial at Ornans
- 03. Cerulean Transience of All My Imagined Shores
- 04. Extracted Nails (from “Pantalgia” comp)
- 05. Intro – Mourning September (demo 1)
- 06. Impoverished Filth (demo 1)
- 07. Extracted Nails (demo 1)
- 08. Thou Messiah (demo 1)
- 09. Outro (demo 1)
