Album Review: Resurrected - Perpetual
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Resurrected play a cancerous strain of deathgrind with comorbidities from Cannibal Corpse to Carcass to Aborted, and if that sounds like a good time to you then it’s probably because it is. Fat riffs like over-ripe cysts, the coarse fuzz of wire wool scraped over raw wounds. This is very comfortable territory for me; the blast and groove, the commitment to revolting, tasteless heaviness, the gurgle of the grime through the slaughterhouse grate. And you will notice that Cannibal Corpse influence by the way; “Sanity is Lost” is the spitting image of a latter day Corpsegrinder cut that would’ve slipped, noctambulant and murderous, onto “Evisceration Plague” with ease. It’s the intricate but offensively heavy chug riffs with the quick-time hi-hat shimmering away over a kick-snare pattern that hits like a life sentence, only to drop with a heaving lurch into a drooling, inbred Uruk-Hai of a thrash riff. In other places Resurrected opt for a crippling slam salvo (“Decomposed”), kick drums firing away with ankle-snapping vigour. Powerchord hatchets slice into backbones of writhing tremolo lines; Exhumed among a hundred others have trodden this path before, but, well, “If it isn’t broken” remains an axiom for a reason.
I’m not sure I’d consider it a flaw exactly, but what Resurrected bring to the table isn’t exactly the most original thing you might ever wish to consume. That’s not a dealbreaker for me because if every album I heard from now until the sun burned cold sounded like Cannibal Corpse and “Symphonies of Sickness” era Carcass, I would die happy. But it does mean that if you’re less lovestruck by deathgrind than I am then you’ll likely find less to enjoy than did I. It’s also not just other bands that they sound nervously close to – some riffs also seem a bit too similar for comfort with...other riffs that the band are playing mere songs distant. It’s a fair enough riff they have on “Forever Damned” at 1.36 – a jaunty lick centring around a pull-off onto an open string, but you’ll hear the like scattered here and there across the rest of the release (1.38 of “Echoes of Creation” for one example, 0.51 on “Into Mighty Death” for another) – never as wearing as repetition might imply, but noticeable nonetheless. Perhaps it was a necessary sacrifice in order to pen the sorts of spontaneous human combustion riffs they also have in the holster; “Echoes of Creation” opens with a riff designed to stress test bomb shelter ceilings – again, not a startlingly novel riff, two open string palm mutes into a power chord that ascends or descends with each iteration, but fuck if it doesn’t hit like rapid-onset food poisoning. There’s something of an apropos theme going on here, and someone with a sharper wit than mine could probably make a pithy quip about a band called Resurrected playing the same riffs we’ve been hearing since the late 80’s, but when it’s this much fun, who am I to argue with the path they’ve picked?
The bass is a throaty rumble, minotaur brawn hitched to a fretboard chugging away like someone strung it with overhead pylon cables that the bassist has to rambunctiously twat with a hammer to play. The snare halberds through the mix in a way I find instantly gratifying; you do sometimes get releases wherein the drummer is blasting his ass off only to find himself buried somewhere in the overall mire of sound. I want snare hits to go through me like a vindaloo fired from a railgun, so it’s an inestimable delight to report that not once was a solitary decibel shaved from the drum performance. They even pull off something I’m generally sceptical of – a cover. Malevolent Creation’s “Infernal Desire” makes for an undeniably effective climax that fits into the album’s repertoire seamlessly. I might even prefer it to the original, but that could more be a result of me having barely listened to Malevolent Creation before. I should probably do something about that, but if and when I do, it will be as a result of Resurrected doing them sterling justice as a capstone for their own efforts – regardless of how much I feel as though bowing out on a cover version risks overshadowing your own work with someone else’s.
“Perpetual” was, on the whole, a blast. It’s the sort of joyously antisocial yet familiar racket that your gran thinks all heavy metal sounds like, and by rights it ought to leave any slavering genre fanboy (me, in fewer words) rapturous. This stuff never gets old, and in forty years when i’m drooling away in a nursing home forgotten by my relatives it’ll doubtless still prompt bouts of geriatric neck trauma from me. If you’re less enamoured with this stuff it won’t convert you, but for those of you who have acquired the taste for this breed of rotteness it will doubtless leave a grin plastered on your mug that you could measure in miles.
Be the first to comment