Lets get a few things straight. If it is well performed, I can find something to enjoy in any of the sub-genres that metal has to offer. Its not strange to find me blasting Heavenly one minute, Behemoth the next, and then round things out with some Overkill and Down. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) the sub-genre of Goregrind has yet to even strike the slightest of a chord in me. If only Carcass could have foreseen some of the grossly underwhelming, unoriginal, and damn near un-listenable music that Reek of Putrefication would later inspire, the genre would have probably never have gotten off it’s poorly stitched feet. Patologicum just happens to be another band that thinks the world needs one more dose of regurgitated “brutality”.

I don’t even know where to fucking begin. Should I start with the the guitar tone, which, thanks to the scooped out mids, is devoid of any note definition and sounds like the band doesn’t know that there is more to guitar playing than just using the first couple of frets on the lowest tuned string? Without jesting, some of the slower riffs on this album sound like the breakdown to a Slipknot song. Famous By Urge is a good example of this. Should I start with the annoying, tired, and overly-extended sound bites of various horror movies, squishing noises, and screams of pain that begin almost every track? Or, should I start with the vocals that brought me 5 seconds of laughter followed by a 28-minute test of my endurance as a listener. Without exaggeration, it sounds like the mic was swallowed and the vocalist recorded the struggles of trying to vomit it out whilst choking on it at the same time. No lyric sheet can help you here; I cannot detect any resemblance of enunciation that pretty much every vocalist in any style of music uses to pronounce their lyrics and give them a certain tone. There is no tone, no pronunciation here, just the sound of a stomach that is about to explode. As for the only non-abysmal aspect of the band, the drumming here is standard fare, blasting, slowing down, then repeating.

If it wasn’t for the aforementioned intro sound bites, I don’t think it would have been possible to distinguish one song from another. There is damn near nothing in the way of melody, nothing in the way of atmosphere (unless the sound of being trapped in your own digestive juices counts as such), absolutely no memorable riffs, and nothing authentically brutal. As for the production, it is flawed by its own muddiness and simply complicate things further.

Anyway, I know there is a very small, but devoted fan base for this type of metal who probably think I deserve to have my genitals vaporized, but I can’t help but bash this when I know there is such a huge amount of better music out there. Hetacomb of Aberration is the type of album you show your friends when you want a good laugh that will last for about half a minute, but not something that you can really take seriously without hitting the stop button soon after you’ve gotten a dose of Rectal Love.