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Every time I write a review that people disagree with, I always get some fucking retard who responds to me with a stupid comment like “You’re just a brutal death metal fan, you don’t know shit about this music, faggot!”  This always makes me laugh hysterically because, contrary to popular belief, I’m not a fan of brutal death metal.  I’ve been to enough brutal death metal festivals to know if I attended one more I’d put my fucking head through a window.

The overwhelming majority of brutal death metal bands are talentless fucking retards who would do the underground a huge service if they just lay their instruments out end to end and drove a steamroller over them and abandoned their goal to be the slammin-est, brutal-est band in Estonia.  Finding a single brutal death metal album I like is like finding a gold nugget lodged in a turd in the toilet.  A Devourment album is like finding a 20 pound gold brick encrusted with diamonds, rubies and emeralds in my poop.  You don’t ask how it got there, you just roll up your sleeve, fish it out and make a fortune selling it on eBay two years later.

The latest full length offering by these Texas brutes is titled Unleash The Carnivore and is the follow-up to the somewhat disappointing Butcher The Weak.  Devourment burst onto the scene with the relentless, uncompromising brutality of their 1998 debut, Molesting The Decapitated, an album so vicious and visceral it became an instant favorite of mine and is an album I still listen to regularly to this day.  It was a perfect blend of simplistic songwriting, great execution and a vocal delivery style that countless bands have emulated since.  Where Butcher The Weak failed to top the debut was in the song writing department.  The songs were decent, but far too many songs just sounded like material from Molesting The Decapitated rearranged and re-recorded, it just lacked it’s own identity.

Unleash The Carnivore sees Devourment abandoning this strategy and returning to their roots of writing simple catchy riffs, adding some sick blasts and glazing it with lung butter.  From the opening blasts of “Unleash The Carnivore” to the final gurgle of “Field Of The Impaled”, Unleash The Carnivore is a relentless bulldozing slab of axe-swinging, skull-crushing, head banging brutality in every sense of the word.

Devourment have a simple goal; to put your teeth on the curb and stomp on your head.  Mission accomplished.  While listening to Unleash The Carnivore for the first time I did what I only seem to do when listening to the most mindlessly stupid brutal death metal; I started growling along to the music into my fist. Normally this is a stupidly guilty pleasure I can enjoy without fear of looking like a meth crazed lunatic, but on this particular occasion my girlfriend walked in on me, fist clenched, hunched over, gurgling into my hand and asked me what the hell I was doing.  Telling her I was incapable of listening to the music without grunting along into my fist seemed like a stupid response so I went with the less embarrassing response of “I’m masturbating.”  She gave me a disgusted look, sighed told me I was disgusting and walked away and I was once again safe to resume gurgling into my knuckles in peace for another 20 minutes.

Far too many people hate Devourment for stupid reasons.  They claim the music is stupid, it’s just a bunch of blasting and gurgling.  They seem to not realize that that’s the entire fucking point.  These guys aren’t starting a death metal Mensa group!  Brutal death metal is a purely primal release, just a group of guys in a recording studio being Neanderthals, grunting, thumping their chests and destroying their instruments.  It’s not about who can write the most technical riff, or who can write a gentle melody, it’s all about trying to make the listener want to put their fist through something while listening to it.

The song writing, song structure and musicianship on Unleash The Carnivore surpasses that of Molesting The Decapitated in every regard.  If you listen to the two albums back to back you almost end up looking at Molesting The Decapitated like it’s Unleash The Carnivore‘s retarded cousin.  Unleash The Carnivore is faster, heavier, with a darker and more violent atmosphere, with a much better production and even sicker vocals!

Former bassist, now vocalist, Mike Majewski sent me a copy of the digipak to review, and I’ve gotta say, this is one of the nicest packaging I’ve seen on a death metal release in ages.  The creature on the cover, by legendary death metal artist Dan Seagrave, is like a modern version of the creature from the cover of Suffocation‘s Effigy Of The Forgotten.  It looks cool when you look at a picture online, but until you have it in your hands and see it up close, checking out all of the detail, it’s really amazing.  I’m hoping Brutal Bands makes a full sized poster of it just so I could stare at it for hours, it’s that fucking cool.  The background behind the creature and the artwork in the huge 18-page poster fold booklet, are handled by Par Olofsson who has done insane artwork for The Faceless, Abysmal Dawn, Prostitute Disfigurement, Severed Savior and Deeds Of Flesh.  9 full panels of the backside are used for a big poster print of a giant standing in a scene that wouldn’t be out of place on an Obituary cover.  If that wasn’t enough, Mike Majewski, who is no slouch when it comes to gory metal designs himself, came up with a cool black and white circular creature of his own for the CD cover.  A lot of time and effort was put into this effort, inside and out, and it shows.

Top to bottom, front to back Devourment‘s Unleash The Carnivore is a brutal death metal fan’s wet dream come true.  It’s ridiculously heavy, brutal as fuck and completely and utterly retarded.  If you’re looking for an album that will challenge you mentally, keep looking, however, if you’re mentally challenged, this is the album for you.  The only downside to Unleash The Carnivore is I know for every brutal death metal album this entertaining there’s 2,000 that completely fucking suck and are totally worthless pieces of shit.  The quota for awesome brutal death metal has been met, which now means I’ve got 1,999 shitty albums to go through until I find the next golden turd.

Review byTeufel