Album Review: Coathanger Abortion - Plan C
Reviewed by Daniel Phipps
For as long as I have been a fan of brutal death metal, Tennessee’s Coathanger Abortion have been a name firmly within the scene delivering their brand of ghastly death metal. Plan C is the bands third full length record which see’s Coathanger Abortion bringing us their first new full length in seven years and again see’s them work alongside Comatose Music for its release.
Opening up 'Plan C' and taking no prisoners is the seven minute monolith 'What Lies Underneath'. Within this track Coathanger Abortion delivers to you a varied display of old school brutality. The track showcases the band bringing a slab of all out aggression in its early stages, before meshing into a far more groove based style of death metal. It feels like the band just took two tracks and smashed them together with how the styles of the 2 sections changed, but it’s performance is slick and it’s a very solid opening to the album.
The groove is definitely where Coathanger Abortion excel on 'Plan C', and you really get a feel for those riffs a lot more in my opinion with a lot of these riff compositions have a distinctly punky feel in their execution which may sound odd to read but they work ever so well within the record. Overall 'Plan C' really sticks to the classic style with razor tight sounding guitar work and solid drums which would suit fans of early Cannibal Corpse and Broken Hope (the album finishes with a cover of the Broken Hope track Cannibal Crave). The production used on 'Plan C' also stays very true to these bands with its classic feel, along with its gore filled artwork which adorns the records cover.
Coathanger Abortion do deliver a decent set of tracks for this output and when it hits its high points then it really elevated how much I enjoyed the record. This being said there are parts of 'Plan C' which don’t really offer the same level of enjoyment and this unfortunately does occur more than once where it fails to grip and engage me fully compared to other points within its run time. If you want a good old slab of gore filled death metal like the good old days then 'Plan C' will surely do the trick for you.
