Album Review: Putrid Offal – Obliterated Life
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
“Putrid Offal”. The name alone should tell you about as much as you could reasonably need to know. Deathgrind a la fellow Frenchmen Benighted is the chef’s recommendation before us today; fourteen slices of dripping charcuterie with which to grace my crass English palette. But what else could be expected of the land that gave us steak tartare? The French like their meat raw.
Considering that they got their start knocking on thirty five years ago, it would be understandable if you thought father time might have blunted their edge. Understandable. But incorrect. “Obliterated Life” is a heinous amalgam of grindcore speed and death metal’s odoriferous charms. It sprints out the stalls right from the starting gun with a drumroll into unhinged death/grind riffage. I felt at home immediately, surrounded as I was by well-worn Carcass and Aborted cassettes. I can be lured out my dank hovel by the presentation of either foodstuffs or appropriately filthy metallic offerings. Putrid Offal oblige with a deluge of suppurating delicacies; slavering monstrosities of tracks like “Meat Stall” sprint for the throat with unbridled aggression, but never forget to drop in absurdly venomous cleaver swings like they do at 1.25 with a riff heavy enough to shift tidal patterns, the drum beat under it shifting to prevent it getting repetitious while maintaining booty-shaking levels of groove. “Privilege of Pain” pulls the same trick too, melding that groove with cauterising blastbeat barrages. It’s straight out the “Symphonies of Sickness” playbook, a well worn tome to be sure, but nonetheless while I’m wise to their tricks, they hit no less hard for it. Peer hard as you might, you’ll find no reinventions of the wheel here, but you don’t necessarily need to when the old favourites are just as inviting the next time around.
While there are lengthier tracks that lean into the death metal side of the chopping board, us grindcore cultists are in good company too. “Ribcage Blues” and “Agony Prevails” threaten the speed barrier with the type of hellish alacrity that shoots me back to fond hours spent destroying my room to Inhume’s “Chaos Dissection Order” masterpiece; and that intro riff on “Entrails Emancipation”, gourmet shit right there. I could listen to this forever, and in some senses it feels as though I have been. Music like this feels integral to me somehow, woven through me to an extent. I remember it coming up in one of my counselling sessions back when I was ill, but it’s difficult to communicate why music this loud and aggressive is so compelling to someone who wouldn’t normally engage with death metal, grindcore, or any of their incestuous offspring. But the need, the extent to which I define myself as a metalhead by my love of this particular breed of sound, is always there. If I am biased because of it – and I am, unavoidably, very biased in favour of music that sounds this way – I can at least offer an opinion very well seasoned by exposure to the unsavoury that Putrid Offal are providing an excellent example of the sound here.
There’s nothing that “Obliterated Life” does wrong by the yardsticks I choose to use, but for those of you less enthralled by this malodorous little sub-genre you’re not going to find anything here that you wouldn’t get out of numerous other bands, up to an including the foundational greats of the genre. It’s a deathgrind release through and through, for better or worse, and if it’s interpretation of the style is manna from heaven to me, there is ultimately little that’s defines it as unique. I’ve plucked out a number of other names by way of comparison – a complimentary comparison for certain, but the broader point is that there’s nothing here that’s uniquely “Putrid Offal”. The album is reminiscent of plenty of other works out there in the messy world of gore drenched music, and while I enjoyed the shit out of my spell with Putrid Offal, they haven’t necessarily surmounted nor supplanted any of the other myriad albums in the genre that I also adore. I wouldn’t go so far as to say “this could be anyone”, because that would feel pretty uncharitable to an album I’ve liked as much as this one, but… yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that sounds like this. to really hit that vaunted, morally dubious upper tier of the style, they’d need to become forwarding thinking enough to stand out more than they currently do.
Hopefully it’s clear enough though that I’ve had a grand time with “Obliterated Life”. If anything I view it as an intercontinental bonding exercise - England and France have had something of a contentious relationship over the years, though most would concede that today’s disgruntled politicking is a step up from the hundreds of years of back and forth frays over which we’ve kicked seven shades of shit out of each other. Perhaps there will always be a level of chagrin there; irrespective of which - I sign off with the dear hope that we can at least, as nations and people, agree on the respective merits of each other’s metal bands before we go back to grumbling about fishing rights.
Vive la France!
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