EP Review: Cartilage - Tales From The Entrails: A Necrology
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Hi kids! Do you like Carcass? Hopefully. But then the question becomes WHICH Carcass, because it’s not as though they ever stood still now is it? That said, the people’s choice does more often than not seem to be their seminal “Heartwork” release, and it won’t prove taxing to even the most incurious frame of mind to see why. Besides the midpaced trench warfare of stuff like “Buried Dreams” or “No Love Lost” comes the gleaming surgical instrumentation of the title track, or the reanimated corpse of thrash replete with solos frankly uncouth in their catchiness with “Blind Bleeding the Blind”, or even the savage serenade that is my personal favourite “Arbeit Macht Fleisch”. It’s a tour de force of melodeth might, and one that in the heady throes of yesteryear held me in a certain thrall. But the honeymoon phase wasn’t fated to last; I respect Heartwork, both as an album and as a wider representation of the subgenre it helped manifest alongside other such icons such as Slaughter of the Soul or The Jester Race. But it isn’t my favoured pile of afterbirth within Carcass’ storied discography. That dubious honour goes to Reek of Putrefaction.
There is an army of noise merchants out there who worship at the rusted butcher’s altar of Reek of Putrefaction, but even for those of us who speak with such obsequious devotion of it’s visceral canticles, deference is typically given to it’s younger brother, a pestilential congregation of vile hymns by the name of Symphonies of Sickness. A mongrel fusion of death metal and grindcore, it’s influence is as immutable as it is unsavoury, and it’s here that we really begin to see the foundational basis for Cartilage’s own DNA. To a large extent, if you love Symphonies of Sickness, then you should also love this. It’s all there, from the fluid, intricate solo work, to the hydrochloric sneer of the vocals, the smooth, almost luxuriant transitions into apoplectic blastbeats, the catchiness, the gritty production...had Carcass opted to rest on their laurels following the release of Symphonies of Sickness, something like this could well have followed.
But It doesn’t do to just consider the band as some alternate universe iteration of another outfit; for when Nostradamus peered into the nebulous far flung realms of what was to be and scrawled hastily in that most renown of his prophecies “they’ll do a few more bangers then go a bit death ‘n roll which will confuse the shit out of everyone then like 20 years and a reunion later you’ll get Surgical Steel and the world shall rejoice once more” he surely couldn’t have known how correct he’d be. Cartilage must stand on their own two rotted stumps. Trying to peel the band off their template and attempting to ignore that Carcass exist for a moment, it’s clear that Cartilage have released an absolute corker of a EP, particularly on tracks 2 & 3 (“Frothed Vomit Slosh” and “Globs of Gore”) where a tumultuous ambush of fantastic grind riffs awaits you. “Ape-u-tator” though...beyond the obvious criticism that it spends too long pissing around with an introduction before it drops into a basic but unreasonably groovy bit of Haemorrhage-adjacent goregrind that spreads Cartilage’s wings a touch broader than Carcass alone, the problem goes a bit deeper. Not so long back there was an instance where a woman was horrifically mauled by a Chimpanzee she was keeping as a pet; while this was happening, the woman’s friend called 911 – the audio of that call was released, and it sounds as if that is the same audio that’s used as a sample to open this track (I checked the call itself on youtube and it sounds identical). This – the use of real images, sounds or videos of people suffering miserable torture or death for the purposes of entertainment – instantly soured my impressions of the release as a whole. It immediately takes my esteem of a band down a substantial notch; as much of a imbecile as someone would have to be to keep a goddamn chimpanzee as a pet, that does not license anyone to use their suffering for fun. It’s marginally less of an indictment for Carcass, as the images they used for “Reek of Putrefaction” were pulled from medical textbooks and therefore it’s possible to argue that those images were meant to be looked at by a broad audience. It’s not an argument I’d necessarily agree with, but at least it’s something.
That one sample instantly deflated my otherwise exuberant take on the album. Cleft of it, I’d be positively gushing about how much I liked “Tales From the Entrails”, even if it is damnably obvious what loins their cloth is cut from. If the use of samples or imagery depicting real human pain bothers you less than it bothers me – and I’ll admit that if you tend to swim in the murky waters of death or goregrind as much as I do then a level of exposure to it is something of an occupational hazard – and especially if you enjoy the likes of Carcass, Impaled, Exhumed, Foetal Juice, Inhume, or bands of similar ilk, then I can imagine you getting a monumental kick out of this. I just hope they leave the samples on the cutting room floor next time.
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