OUTRE TOMBE - ABYSSE MORTIFERE

VA VA DEATH METAL VOOM FROM QUEBEC

Quebec’s Outre Tombe’s brand of retro-sloppy low end death metal bludgeon is the sonic equivalent of rolling your eyes, waggling your tongue, banging your head and pulling an obligatory devil sign and vomiting for 40 minutes. That pretty much sums up this 35 minute splatter platter feral DM. It is not highly technical or remotely artistically experimental but is, instead, so soothingly plain and brutal it is almost refreshing.

Fat arsed, wobbly and unfeasibly heavy this is affirmingly old fashioned, unalloyed death metal that is organic, slimy and gloriously meat-headed. It has the fuzzy roughness of Autopsy and bulging groove of Dismember or perhaps early Entombed. That sounds pretty familiar doesn’t it? You could probably walk across the Atlantic on third generation greasy-haired Autopsy enthusiast acts. Somehow, the intention here was not to be original but is founded purely for the love of straightforwardly obnoxious and unreconstructed head banging simplicity.

The vocals are just possessed and so animalistic they sound like a liver might get puked up. The riffs are propulsive and addictive – superficially they are simple but are, in fact, potently well formed. The percussion, too, is pummelling and commanding without needing to be over-engineered. The production, meanwhile, is intentionally muddy which suits this sub-brand of low-end murky thunder.

The low-end, untethered, crusty rampages of the title track or Cenobytes would undermine the foundations of a building with their nefarious, chunky riffs and helter-skelter leads. The battering primitivism, while it can lean towards the afore-mentioned Autopsy-isms also has a strong thrash DNA, especially in the latter half of the album with some real pit-friendly slams. Make little mistake, this an inordinate unholy din that has no sensitives to art or trends. Music like this is self-consciously, intentional made by fans for fans.

Wider society should recognise the usefulness of cacophonous death metal like Outre Tombe. As the world media ignores bombing in the Middle East because Adele is talking about her divorce before releasing her new album and £300 per ticket gigs, it’s perhaps surprising that more people are not tuning into songs like Necrophàge. Sometimes music really should be for the sake of noise.

Abysse mortifère is released via Temple of Mystery