Death to the end
Ever been run over 11 times? Ever had a piano fall on you from a great height like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon? Ever listened to an Aborted CD?
Well let me tell you they all equate to each other perfectly. This is DEATH METAL with a sprinkling of hardcore and kicks you in the nuts time after time after time. Every song is like being assaulted by a rhino, are you getting the point yet?
This is brutal metal that anyone who thinks they like their metal extreme would do well to pick up, technically brilliant and for a death metal album very well recorded 'Slaughter and Apparatus' may just take over from Zyklons 'Disintegrate' as my new benchmark.
Track 1 'The Chondrin Enigma' starts as they mean to go on blasting its way out of the speakers and beating you about the head, variations in pace keep it interesting without softening the blow and you can imagine a seething mosh pit at all their gigs.
So things go until track 5 when they pull out a love song by Lionel Ritchie, ha just kidding they don't let up for anything longer than a random noise intro before bringing out the shovels and hitting you in the head again.
Aborted are Belgian and have been around for a while, since 1995 in fact and since then have released a few full length albums and a few split CDs (I hate those things). In that time they have been sharpening their skills and equipment to give rise to the monster that is this album, but if it's a Frankenstein the stitches hardly show, the hardcore elements actually fit very nicely into the death structure and though I'm no hardcore fan they compliment the heavier genre like blood and bullets, death and suffering, jam and scones. They add another colour to the absolute blackness of the canvas and both come out stronger for it.
I cannot fault the musicianship on show here, guitar work that even my colleague and genius guitarist Pete Worrall would give the devil horns to, huge crunching riffs and widdling that somehow stays within the genre. A session drummer (David Haley from Psycroptic) recorded the drum parts for the album and that guy must have steel springs for ankles, such is the ferocity and speed of the double bass bashing. Good luck getting a replacement for him guys.
So overall a huge album that would sit well on any Death metal fans cd shelf, this is not for the faint hearted but I imagine you've got the point of that by now, the album is due out on Feb 19th 2007 and deserves some attention, it's certainly hard to ignore.