AUTOPSY - Tourniquets, Hacksaws and Graves
June 11, 2014, 9 years ago
(Peaceville)
It's funny: I grew up loving death metal but never said the words "I love AUTOPSY" until recently. The band has always been a slow-burner for me, and it took a long time for their disgusting, excrement-drenched sludge-death to really sink in to my pores and convert me into one of the faithful. But here on album number seven, the band are doing what they do best, no compromises, no changing for anything. The raw production sound is a perfect cure for today's processed death metal, and the sincerity is piled on as thick as the aforementioned excrement here. The guitar solos fly (opener 'Savagery' has a particularly air-guitar-worthy one, right at the song's conclusion); the vocals just drag you down further into the mire; the band is just as powerful when they slow things down to a snail's pace as they are when they're galloping along ('After The Cutting' is the so-not-sterilized antithesis to Surgical Steel's surgical steel); when all is said and done, man, Autopsy have slowly but surely over the years clawed themselves up to a place of very high respect in my death-addled brain. This album is so good that when it ends I'd be happy to listen to it again, because under certain circumstances music gets no better than this.
