On Pestilent Winds...

Seems to be a bit of a strange case, this. Excoriate split up in 2006, after recording this album which is only now seeing the light of day under Sepulchral Voice Records. Aside from a bass player that used to be in Krieg, two band members seem to have worked as session musicians with Toxic Holocaust. An intriguingly mixed pedigree, but a sound that doesn’t really bear that much of a resemblance to either of those two outfits.

This is crustily raw, and utterly authentic brutal thrash metal, in the vein of very early Sepultura (the record features a cover of Mayhem) or the way Holy Moses sounded on the monumental Finished With The Dogs. It harks back to a time when death metal was just the heavier end of thrash; a time which is sadly passed. The riffs are chaotic and obscene, the vocals guttural and bellowing (pretty much a male Sabina Classen), and the drums poundingly pushed forward in the mix. Wonderful.

Some of the playing is sloppy, but then some of the playing on Morbid Visions is sloppy as well; it’s completely irrelevant. This is music that gets the blood pumping: violent energy distilled into a breathless light-brigade charge of deaththrash. This isn’t the heaviness that comes from precision and production, far from it.

Guitar solos are fairly rare, and when they do arise are pretty standard extreme metal squealing, but they succeed in adding a blazing edge to the otherwise dark and murky sound. Punctuating the entire record are the militaristic slow grinds sections that are fairly common in this type of music (think the Troops of Doom intro), but which Excoriate are masters of.

All in all, this record is like exhuming a body you only buried two hours ago; but when you open the casket you find a putrid heap of maggots devouring decaying flesh. Yes, that good! And it rocks far, far harder than Toxic Holocaust, in case you were wondering… It’s a shame they quit before they began. Recommended for fans of raw and authentic deaththrash.