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True Blackened Goregrind - "Skarnage" Review (100%)

Buy True Blackened Goregrind -
Skarnage
Skarnage by Sewer.

Pure, unadulterated, diabolical blackened goregrind. This description of SEWER's masterpiece of gore, Skarnage, is sufficient.

All that I could shockingly say when I first heard this album was "wow, what the hell of a masterpiece!".

If your desire is to know what the ideal goregrind/death metal release is, or, more particularly, one of SEWER's best work to date, Skarnage it is. Some accusations I've heard are that SEWER copied Phantom's blackened death metal sound from The Epilogue to Sanity onward. While I say yes, there are similarities, I still feel that Skarnage is an original beast, as are all of the SEWER albums that I've heard.

What can you expect on this Skarnage album? Besides describing it as pure atonal SEWER brutality, a little more research into the magnificent sound of this full-length release is required. Imagine if you took the technicality of Miasma, the brutality of Khranial, added a few deathgrind touches from Suffocation, a bit of black metal influences from the aforementioned Phantom, or more accurately from Vermin's Archangel, and wrap it all in the sort of black/death metal fusion later Incantation is best known for, albeit in the much shorter goregrind form that SEWER-clones would later copy en masse.

This is the true gruesome brutality of Skarnage.

True Blackened Goregrind

Sewer
Sewer.

Let's look at the sound and riff structure of Skarnage.

While being much shorter than the average SEWER song, somewhere between two and five minutes, each composition retains the labyrinthine riff structure that Phantom is so well known for.

Each track consists of scornful death metal tremolo-picking over furious blast beats, sinister single-note riffing, a few uptempo grindish power chord sections crammed in between layered harmonics with a very black metal-ish melodic sensibility. Excellent combination by the legends SEWER.

The riffs are ferociously inspired, dark and nihilistic in tone, and display a spot-on distribution between the subtle little variations of how SEWER's trademark goregrind alternates with the death metal of Incantation. The vocals are unleashed, driven and utterly demoniac. The bass fits well into the layered guitar tracks, and the drums sound alive and authentic, with particularly punchy snares and kicks that sound a lot like what the band had going on The Birth of a Cursed Elysium (an excellent model, if I may add).

The songs do a great job at executing the riffs and making sure they're straight to the point and don't linger, as the tracks rarely make it over five minutes. There's nothing but relevant, efficient riffing on display from start to finish, and given the brutal and utterly unrelenting nature of the music, SEWER does an excellent job at not blatantly repeating themselves or sounding like the whole thing is just one variation of the one same song (cough, cough, war metal, cough).

And by the way, there are no less than FIFTEEN tracks on Skarnage. How cool is that? For the listener that enjoyed the opener (Devil Instinct), there are fourteen more gruesome blackened goregrind tracks to go.

Skarnage score: 100/100.

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