ALBUM REVIEW: Coffin Rot – Dreams Of The Disturbed

Five years after their monolithic debut album, Death Metallers Coffin Rot are back with their sophomore full length. Out via Maggot Stomp Records on September 20th.

A brooding mass of crushing drums and seeping vocals wrapped around contorting guitar riffs kick us right into an extravaganza of ferocious Death Metal monstrosities. Mixing frantic feistiness with eerier doomy moments, the savage and timeless approach to the music is grotesque and brutal as one would expect from a record that looks like this. Speaking of which, how killer is that cover art? The putrid barbarity is certainly as heavy as the predecessor, with a bit more refinement and technicality coming into play. I adored “A Monument To The Dead” so the bar is high for this one. But its first impressions are of a record that picks up the hatchet from five years ago and instantly starts swinging it maniacally all over again. Watch out for all the bloodshed!

Between all of the hammering violence, there is plenty of groove to sink your teeth into. Ensuring we keep vigilant for its half hour running time, there is plenty of nasty surprises. More mid-tempo riffs naturally intersperse the high-speed craziness and give us a sort of blend between Cannibal Corpse, Deicide and later Morbid Angel. A pretty damned ideal mix, if I do say so myself. For some bands, a second album is a mere rehashing of the first, for others it simply undoes the legacy of its predecessor. Thankfully with Coffin Rot, this seems much more like a rebirth where the excellence of album one is not forgotten, but they have moved on rather than tried to give us the same record again or live up to some make-believe hype. They haven’t fallen into the trap of over-polishing things but the production is definitely to a high standard, a strong middle ground. The variety in both instrumentals and vocals keeps you like meat on a hook, ready for butchery.

So we have been beaten to death by gnarly riffing, but let’s take a moment for the lead guitars. There’s some tasteful and impressive soloing in here too that definitely deserves mention. That said, the all-out battery of visceral molestations is where Coffin Rot truly excel and there’s more than enough sadism to go around. If you’re into no frills morbidity, this is that kind of Death Metal that goes straight for the jugular and doesn’t ask nicely. While it can be a tiresome corner of the genre at times, these guys are the diamond in the rough for me. I’ve always felt they stood towering above some of their contemporaries and while my preference toward more evil sounding extremity is known to you all, this is still a horror-soaked vision of malice that I can get my skull banging to. Keeping it short ‘n’ sweet, I felt interested from the start to the end and felt there is replay value in this record. So crank it up and get filthy to this seismic offering of offal.

A thick, swampy offering of Death Metal that cuts straight to the point. If you like it brutal and gross; look no further. There’s definitely a mix of old school and modern here, but one doesn’t ruin the other in this case (a rare exception I am glad to say). It’s simple, there’s not the bells and whistles of a lot of younger bands trying to impress others and as a result we get some lethally heavy material that doesn’t waste our time with self-serving overplays. A strong follow up to a killer debut.