Macabre Kingdom

The other day I made dinner; probably the first time I’d actually cooked something elaborate from scratch since my daughter was born 10 weeks ago. It was a curry, which I was inspired to make because I’d recently found a big pack of paneer cheese in Lewisham Tesco. Things went well- I had found a box of Masala powder in a local Asian supermarket for only 79p, and ground ginger appeared to be substituting perfectly well for fresh. That is, until I realised that my fresh chillies were no longer fresh. In fact, they had decayed. So I used dried chillies. No problem- except that I misjudged the quantities. The end result was surprisingly impressive in terms of initial flavour, but had such a chokingly hot after-kick that I was worried I had poisoned my wife, so violently did she retch and splutter.

Later that evening, I washed up, while listening to two man death metal project Putrevore (featuring Dave Rotten of Avulsed and Yskelgroth among others, and Roger “Rogga” Johansson of every death metal band). As I scraped the leftovers into the drainage sink, swollen bits of rice swirled along with fragments of onion, Indian cheese, and bits of once-fiery, now-waterlogged paste. The sink itself gargled and belched as the mulchy water drained into its dank maw. A swill of detritus, destined for a stinking mass of household waste somewhere conveniently out of view.

Putrevore, it struck me, were the perfect soundtrack. This is the kind of death metal that festers and burbles like wet compost roughly smeared into your ears. Their sound is a belching swill of blasting one moment, in which it’s hard to pick out riffs among the death metal slobber- like the first few seconds of opening track The Mysteries of the Worm- but flops into a rancid tub of squelching slow riffing the next. The down-tempo grooves here are irresistible- in my view much more memorable than more heralded purveyors of grimy slow death, like Disma or even (one of my own favourites) Undergang. I love the latter, but Putrevore’s sound is denser and more oozing. The vocals are closer to the belch of Demilich; they seem to gargle ancient household waste. The riffing is very straightforward, but sometimes whimsical. I like the weird, loping shape of the main riff on Tentacles Through Time, for instance, which alternates between languid strums and rapidfire snorting. Probably one of my favourite death metal releases from 2012- one of the few things I can see myself coming back to repeatedly. Now, talking of which, I am off to warm up some leftovers.