Album Review: Crimson Butchery - Stalker
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
It must have rather confused the Irish when the dead began rising from the grave en masse. Corpses abroad on the moors, clambering rasping and starved from the peat. It would throw the best of us really, minding your business on your commute one second only to find the undead pawing the bus windows the next. Call it libel if you will, but I know that Crimson Butchery had something to do with this recent eviction from Purgatory's waiting room. I’d bet my life on it, and as exhibit A, here comes their latest expulsion of vitriol, “Stalker”.
It’s snappy. Lean. Svelte. With places to be and shit to do so it won’t spare the time to fuck about with acoustic intros, spacey hallucinogenic interludes or really much of anything beyond sating the stubborn pangs of its bloodlust. It’s death metal that respects your time, death metal with a 9-to-5, two kids and a wife, a hefty commute and a stingy lunch break. As such, it’s stripped back and focused, smashing as much into twenty seven minutes as can physically fit without herniation. It comes at you like a pitbull on a hotdog with cold-blooded anaconda tremolo lines and the sliding chord riffs that make Exhumed such a weaponised distillation of deathgrindpugilism. There’s an encyclopaedic quantity of riffs involved, from pit dynamite like 1.09 in “Cranium Devourment”, a hardcorebeatdown groove straight from the bible of Dying Fetus, to “Bludgeoned to the Grave” setting the starting line on fire with a deformed marauder of a thrash riff.
It’s all so...competent. Not the most exciting word ever, I know, but the way all the parts are locking and gelling together feels like witchcraft. it’s like someone built an impeccably greased Rubik’s cube out of human remnants, everything spinning and reorienting second by second yet nailed together with this faultless professional ease, tighter than Voldemort’s nostrils. Let’s just pick a song at random and drill down into the bedrock of it: how about...”Philosophy of a Knife”? Probably named after a four hour long “documentary” about the infamous Unit 731 human vivisection practices (substantially it’s a torture porn flick shot in black and white with a tonne of Dutch angles for brownie points from the presumably sparsely populated fandom for both artsy fartsy avante-garde film and exploitative low-budget shlocky plotless gorefests). It’s substantially constructed around a snaking backbone of thrash, opening with catchy staccato swoops of triplets, before at 0.22 it’s first transition happens, the drums synchronised in with the transitional riff flawlessly, before slipping smooth as butter into a section that sees the kick drum beaten as though it owes money accompanied by some subtle but delicious cymbal play before another slinky drum fill at 0.36 heralds the coming of jubilant blastbeasts. Are you noticing a pattern here? The percussion and the way it chains the songs together is breathtaking. It’s such a varied performance, a million fills firing off, beats tangling and distorting to bind the tracks into cohesive mini-odysseys, untameable Irish carnivores of chomping, needle-fanged mandibles and arachnid swiftness. It made sense when I saw that Nikhil Talwalkar was behind the kit – he's an preturnaturally talented multi-instrumentalist who has, at the tender age of fucking 20, cemented himself as a premier figure in modern day death metal.
That said - there was leeway enough in the runtime to do more with the solo work, especially considering that the choice cuts of the release are the ones with solos in them. “Stalker” first greets us with a landslide of sweep picking – there was surely space enough to wedge a few more in and still not crack the thirty minute mark. The two singles released (“Stalker” and a contorting heap of writhing guts comprising some of the most technical riffwork on the release alongside a nasty half-time Cannibal Corpse groove called “Lab Rat”) both have solos in them and it was a little disappointing to find them within a minority once i got my grasping mitts on the full album. I found myself loving each individual song, waiting for a frenetic nova of lead work only to be blueballed by a band that is absolutely capable of writing leads so spicy they’d weld your face to the fretboard.
Sometimes I don’t want to be able to clean the gore off. I don’t listen to this music just to be precious about splatter on the apron after all. With Crimson Butchery I came out looking like I’d just detonated a nail bomb inside a cow. It’s slathered from tip to tail in dripping viscera, packed with an honestly unseemly amount of fantastic riffs, and is, above all, outrageously fun. I’d never heard of Crimson Butchery before coming across a promo track on Iron Fortress’ YouTube channel – based on that alone I could’ve told you that the band deserve to be bigger. It’s nice, then, to confirm that the rest of the release broadly measures up to the promise of those first enticing snippets as I came across them a few fleeting weeks back.Maybe i’ll prove that they were behind the zombie apocalypse, maybe I won’t but either way, please excuse me – I’m trapped on a bus and the undead are flapping at the windows like pissheads outside KFC.
