ASPHYXIUM ZINE

Saturday, December 10, 2016

CD Review: EMBALMING THEATRE Re-Animated Tomb Contents (Live at Sedel) (Give Praise Records) by Dave Wolff

Give Praise Records
Released October 9, 2016
A goregrind band with an extensive discography, an album with twenty-seven tracks, and covers by Napalm Death, Dahmer, Mortician, Nasum and Filthy Christians. An ideal means of spending a night with nothing to do. As stated in the title, Re-Animated Tomb Contents (Live at Sedel) is a live album chronicling a show Switzerland’s Embalming Theatre played in their home country in November 2014. It’s unclear why they waited two years to make a recording of this show available on record, but you could argue it was worth the wait. For the studio versions of their original songs I would recommend the demos, splits, EPs and CDs the band has consistently churned out for the last sixteen years. Playing live they exhibit a sound replete with grit and grime somewhat like crust punk and early grindcore; as they draw a healthy amount of death metal influence they are technically well-grounded, not sloppy or untuned. There is a symmetry of both genres that sounds like it comes naturally to Embalming Theatre when they perform to an audience. If there were any mistakes made I didn’t hear any, and their liveliness and fortitude is invariable. The fans who attended this show seemed to appreciate the effort on the band’s part. Quite a few songs read appealing to fans of old Cannibal Corpse and Carcass (Reek Of Putrefactipn et al) if you consider titles like Dead, Stolen, Hacked Up and Raped, Shotgun Vasectomy, Flesh Eating Bacteria and Suffocation in the Sandbox. Baby in the Fridge, We Ate Daddy and Bake the Baby also show a certain amount of black humor added to the mix. I should add the band mostly write lyrics based on real-life stories, likely of the true crime variety, in keeping with the goregrind of old. Their choice of cover songs is a plus for old school death metallers, especially Napalm Death’s Lucid Fairytale and Mortician’s Zombie Apocalypse. I was completely drawn into the brutality of this recording and was wishing their set was even longer by the time it ran its course. -Dave Wolff

Track list:
1. Instru-mental/Pornmatic Drive
2. Dead, Stolen, Hacked Up and Raped
3. Lucid Fairytale (Napalm Death cover)
4. Amputation of the Wrong Leg
5. I Married a Corpse
6. Shoes Made of Human Skin
7. Coin Locker Baby
8. Shotgun Vasectomy
9. Dennis Andrew Nilsen (Dahmer cover) 01:24
10. My Home Is Necropolis Pt. 2
11. DDD Dog Driver Death
12. Flesh Eating Bacteria
13. Vasectomy by Lobster
14. Baby in the Fridge
15. Headbowling
16. My Wife in Concrete Pt. 1
17. Red Carcass River
18. With a Hammer to the Slammer
19. Four Brains, One Hand and One Foot in My Luggage
20. Someone Else in My Coffin
21. We Ate Daddy
22. Bake the Baby
23. Dying Funeral Procession Carnage at the Cemetary
24. Suffocation in the Sandbox
25. Cut to Fit (Nasum cover)
26. Zombie Apocalypse (Mortician cover)
27. Satanist (Filthy Christians cover)

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