In recent years I’ve heard a lot of death metal and goregrind acts hailing from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but I haven’t had much exposure from bands from the motherland… until now. Pyrolagnia Records sent along a few discs for me to review, included among them was the Russian Maniaxxx 4-Way Split release featuring Abnormal, Cryptic Vomit, Haemorr Drench and Morrah.

Abnormal fill up the first 5 tracks of the split with self described "technical death metal in the vein of Dying Fetus". Upon listening to their 5 tracks, the only comparisons I could make between them and Dying Fetus is that each band has a drummer, guitar players, bassists and vocalists. That’s it. The music is mid paced brutal death metal with raspy vocals that sound like they’re being grunted through a piece of pipe. The drumming is ridiculously simplistic with the same beat being pounded throughout the 5 tracks and is far from impressive. The riffing is decent, but not something anyone would consider mind-blowing technicality, and is more rock-death than anything. It’s not terrible, but it hardly in the same genre, let along the same league as any of the bands they compare themselves to; Dying Fetus, Suffocation or Internal Bleeding.

The next 12 tracks are taken from Cryptic Vomit’s XXXL Gore Ballads demo. The music is drum machine backed noisy cyber goregrind. The band switches the vocal approach often throughout the release, ranging from a robotic sounding cyber growl, to a more standard goregrind gurgle, to cleaner death metal vocals with a few other bizarre vocal approaches thrown in. The riffing for this outfit is really simple, with a really strange guitar tone. From the beginning of "I Throw My Crap On Your Car" to the end of "Our Guts On Your Stupid Face", Cryptic Vomit confuse, annoy and generally don’t entertain in the slightest, as all they seem to do is layer annoying sound on top of even more annoying sound until the end result is both stupid as well as pointless.

Following them are Haemorr Drench who describe themselves as cybergrind in the vein of S.M.E.S. and Libido Airbag. I hate both of those bands and never really bothered listening to them music, but Haemorr Drench definitely do play in a cybergrind style, laced with plenty of video game-like sounds, slow-paced drum machines, endless audio samples, and totally warped and processed vocals. Considering I hate this style in general, hearing it done really poorly is far more annoying than I could have ever possibly imagined.

The final act is the groovy death metal act Morrah who only have three tracks on this album. Their style is actually vaguely similar to early Gorefest with a bit more of a rocking groove to it mixed with The Bleeding-era Cannibal Corpse riffing. The production on this isn’t that great and lacks the thick beefy sound this style requires to truly be effective. That said, the music itself is actually pretty decent, and their material is definitely the highlight of the entire release, however, there still isn’t enough there to really catch my interest enough to make me want to rush out and try to find any more of their material that may exist.

After listening to this album beginning to end, I’ve come to the conclusion that either there are no good Russian bands in the underground metal scene, or these are just some of the worst ones packaged on this release. Unless you’re a huge fan of shitty low fi goregrind, cybergrind and death metal there’s really no point in picking up this release, and out of all of the acts, Morrah is the only one whose music I could actually tolerate. I wouldn’t even recommend picking up this CD for free and using it as a beer coaster, it truly is that worthless.

Written By: Teufel