Album Review: Perfidious - Savouring His Flesh
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Italy’s death metal scene was spawned from the outpouring of fury that occurred when someone first put pineapple on pizza and has been going strong ever since. Hour of Penance. Putridity. Fleshgod Apocalypse. Devangelic. You might well have your own list of favourites. But in truth there’s something about Italian media in general that appeals to me. In the heyday of the 70’s and 80’s these continental bolognaise fanatics just seemed to churn out the most exquisite selection of trashy filmic gorefests, nonsensical expeditions of seldom connected bursts of sex and violence piped white hot and smouldering into my teenage eyeballs. Who was I to resist the siren song of spaghetti chomping genius Lucio Fulci and his magnum opus, Zombie Flesh Eaters, or his equally entertaining “Gates of Hell” trilogy? What of Burial Ground? Hell of the Living Dead? Nightmare City? Cannibal Holocaust? Oh! Shall we dabble in westerns? Django? The Great Silence? The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? Throw in some possibly-not-entirely-culturally-authentic donner kebab pizza and you have yourself the makings of a perfectly splendid night. Yet for all the temptation exists to wax lyrical on all the above, we are ultimately here to discuss one Italian export in particular: Perfidious, and their new album “Savouring His Flesh”.
Perfidious make a few illustrious references in their promo sheet - Suffocation, Deicide and Cannibal Corpse. And I’m not going to deny the similarities there, but equally...they’re not quite on the money either. No, the band this album really put me in mind of was almighty brutal death outfit Deeds of Flesh. Less vicious and mind-altering technically speaking for sure, but still – the elements are all there, in the sudden flurries of chromatic alternate picked riffs, the tremolo riffing, those delicious slams, the sewer floor gurgling of the vocals, that filthy production job, the frequent variations in tempo and the complex song structures...it’s not all the way into uncanny simulacrum territory, but even so, listen to this and then listen to the first Deeds of Flesh album “Trading Pieces” and tell me you don’t hear the similarities. “Blood of Sinner” is an undulating monstrosity of tendonitis invocation, all spider-fingered fretboard molestations and sickening plunges into low-E string palm mute abuse, while “Savouring His Flesh From the Cross” leverages eerie background harmonies on faster sections interspersed with foreboding mid-paced parts to keep you on your toes. If it’s typical on the one hand it’s nonetheless done excellently on the other.
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.
