Three years after their departure from the horribly failed Deathvomit label, Bay Area-gorethrashers Impaled are back with their third full length offering, Death After Life. Having heard all of their previous full length, split and EP releases, one thing has always struck me about Impaled; they’re great to listen to for a short time, but quickly lose their appeal and wind up in my pile of stuff I loved for a week and never bothered with again- like my old Playboy stash, which my eyes never grace now that I’ve got access to more extreme raunchy explicit smut than I’ll ever know what to do with. As of now I’ve been listening to the new album on and off for about two weeks, and haven’t become instantly bored of it yet. So far so good. The first thing I noticed about the recording is the production is pretty rough; listening to it I feel like I’ve got water in my ears because everything just sounds really off. Production aside, Death After Life is actually a pretty solid release. The comparisons to Carcass will forever follow this band, mostly due to the Jeff Walker-ish shrieks, well, that and they often "borrow" musically from the Carcass catalog, but there’s a lot more to their overall sound as they include more of their Bay Area thrash influence into their sound, along with the occasional soupçon of Swede-death. The high-low vocal trade-offs are far superior to their oft-compared Bay Area brethren Exhumed, as is their musicianship, song writing, and overall body odor. The songs chug along like a rickety horse-drawn carriage over bumpy terrain causing the listener to bounce about like a seizure victim to the infectious grooves lay down by the dual axe attack. Where Impaled flourish and stand apart from the rest are in their hilarious intros, showing they’re not just doing this for the adoration of dozens of greasy pockfaced teenage boys, but rather, because it’s fun, hence the happygrind label I’ve placed upon them (I never said happygrind was a bad thing). Fans of older Impaled material will be happy, as long as they can stop whining about the production long enough to shut up and listen to it, as will fans of Heartwork-era Carcass and probably some other random fat kids. Whether I’ll continue listening to this album for another week, or well into the future, has yet to be determined, what I do know is Impaled don’t completely suck, and the guys in the band are actually pretty cool, although I still want to watch Raul and ex-Ember guitarist/drummer Abbas Jaffary wrestle in a kiddie pool filled with Jell-O. No real reason, I just think it’d be funny.

Written By: Teufel