Repulsive Dissection - Cut Open The Aberration (Sevared Records; 2009)

First off, this is our first review in a month! I feel kind of shitty that I've been sort of aloof from Slam-Minded for a while, but I have a couple things to review soonish so apologies for getting lost in the shuffle of life...onto the brutality!

Repulsive Dissection is somewhat of an "all-star" project in brutal death metal, so I had pretty high expectations. I remember hearing a track from this disc on Myspace and my first thought being "fuck these vocals", but I am actually getting used to them. They remind heavily of old Carcass or Exhumed and are almost always the very "blurg"-y deep vocals, though there are excellent screams sometimes combined with or contrasting the slurry of gutturals, which I appreciate. One thing that consistently surprises here is the riff-writing, which almost seems like weird progressive death metal riff-writing at some points. No wonder Yura Kowalchuk's known for his insane guitar tabbing ability; this dude can fucking play. Fredrik Widigs of Soils of Fate/MP5K fame is the drummer here and his skills and overall playing style remind a lot, on this album, of the drummer of Human Mincer on Degradation Paradox; tight, fast, blasting and technical, Fredrik bashes his skins into oblivion throughout the entirety of this celebration of the extremities of brutal technical death metal.

Barrett was right to release this, it's gonna end up being a huge seller in this style, and for good reason; it's fucking sick. Songs like "Decimate" have the interesting, off-kilter riffing and sick technical blasting down fucking pat and a few songs have some demonstrative jazz sections that sound a little like something Atheretic would do. The one main problem I have here is that, though every song is incredibly dense and packed with cool ideas, they all sound a little too similar, and there aren't enough fucking slams, but that can be slightly forgiven due to the intense nature of this kind of music. There are SOME slamming sections so not all is totally lost, and Human Mincer only had a few on the last album too. Anyway, I keep invariably going back to HM to describe what this sounds like, so I'd say that that's a good approximation of the style on display. If you like your death metal brutal, extreme, oppressively technical and even a bit progressive, you'll like this. Check it out and give it more of a chance than I originally gave it; you'll probably grow to like it.