Album Review: Perfidious – Savouring His Flesh

Slithering unlovely and sodden with gore from track to track the album consistently varies it’s assault, reeling your interest back in should it ever start to wander from the killing fields. The production sits in this delightful sweet spot between legible and filthy, with guitar tones like rusted, chunk-flecked hunting knives atop gravid bass lines, swollen with putrefactive gasses, accompanied by drums popping through the mix to punch sucking wounds in your flesh. Death metal can – not unfairly – be accused of monotony on the vocal front but Maurizio Zani understands that there is more than one ingredient in a truly scrumptious meatball, and swaps between wrenching his throat membranes adrift with seeping gutturals and an almost hardcore adjacent snarl. All of which is to say that this album has that late 90’s brutal death sound that seems to just bathe me in orgasmic floods of serotonin, this wonderful dirty crunch to it that manages to be heavy without having to tune down 12 octaves and only play riffs that look like binary code if you tab them out.

The best song by far here is the merciless Dying Fetus homage that is “Your World Crumbles”, sledgehammer grooves courtesy of the meatiest drumming on the release, as resident stick wielder Giovanni Mantini attempts to frack the earth’s mantle with his kit. And the riff at 3:06 and the way it splices with the drum fills behind it will incite mass chest hair growth on everything in the surrounding square mile up to and including livestock. I can’t help but burst out into spontaneous Frank Mullen hand wibbles, I find myself two-stepping down the aisles in the local off license if I listen to it in public. Which isn’t to say everything is rosy here. These songs, as much as I enjoy them, could do with a touch of pruning here and there. “Enclosed in my Vision” is a really good song for the most part – one of the more straightforward headbang manifestos on the album, chock full of succulent thrash riffs and a kick-snare hate campaign on drums – but it also rides the same riff at the end for 2 full minutes. There is other stuff going on at the same time, but even so, a little self-editing here wouldn’t have gone amiss. “Infernal Vengeance (Jesus Dead)” drags as well – as much as the band do try to keep things spritely with a few upbeat transitions here and there this song is for the most part just arthritically riding the bottom string like an unenthusiastic lover. Somnolent, dead-on-arrival filler that the album would be wholly better off without.

Overall though I really enjoyed my time with “Savouring His Flesh”. It doesn’t get to quite the level of morally reprehensible deathly overkill that my beloved classics of mid-late late 90s brutal death do, but nor is it a million miles off. I can’t deny that I’d love to see them amp the technicality and speed up a few more notches and truly give me the early Deeds of Flesh clone that I seem to be pining for, but the band’s own identity has to come first, and whatever they do next I’ll be watching ravenously.