What the fuck? I know it’s been a while since I last heard an Aborted album but when did they move to Sweden? Maybe not literally, but musically I remember Aborted being a fairly relentless, and to be honest pretty boring, straight forward brutal death metal act. The material on their latest full length offering, Strychnine.213, is a pretty big departure musically for the band and has pissed off a lot of the band’s die hard fans who’ve gone as far as to compare the release with the less-than-stellar Swansong by Carcass.

Strychnine.213 is still, at heart, a relentless brutal death metal effort. The vocals of Sven De Caluwé are as guttural and nasty as ever, there are tons of blast beats and shredding riffs, the main change is the band have included more melody into their material. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s that die hard death metal fans hate change and the only thing they hate more than change is melody.

Throughout the album’s ten tracks a strong Swedish melodic death metal influence is evident, I’ve heard many of the riffs on Strychnine.213 on releases by countless melodic death metal acts, some good, some bad, obviously originality has never been Aborted’s strong point, but the fusing of brutal death metal with melodic death metal seems to work pretty well.

The tracks are aggressive, Sven barks like a rabid dog throughout, the riffing flows cleanly between relentless brutality and melody and the drumming suits the music perfectly. On previous Aborted albums I’d get bored quickly because the songs all had the same structure and pattern; blast, shred, bark. Song after song, put me to fucking sleep. Strychnine.213 I can actually listen to from beginning to end because they’ve finally added something to the mix, it keeps things interesting. Blast blast blast riff riff riff roar roar roar gets boring really fucking fast, but toss in some tempo changes and suddenly it actually sounds like Aborted are a band playing music and not just a bunch of drunk Belgians playing fast and obnoxious for the sake of playing fast and obnoxious.

People criticized Carcass when they released Heartwork, they criticized Napalm Death when they made Diatribes, they criticized Nasum when they made Human 2.0, they even criticized Sven’s old side project Leng Tch’e when they released Marasmus and now they criticize Aborted’s Strychnine.213. The one thing all of those albums have in common is they weren’t the same old thing and they included melody to the material. Heartwork is by far my favorite Carcass album, Diatribes is one of my favorite Napalm Death releases, Human 2.0 is my favorite Nasum disc, Marasmus is a killer Leng Tch’e release and Strychnine.213 is by far Aborted’s best release to date. It’s not quite as good as the other albums I mentioned above, but at least I don’t hate Strychnine.213 like I did Aborted’s earlier material. For you die hards, hey, it could be worse, it could be the new Cryptopsy, be thankful that it’s not.

Written By: Teufel