The first question that comes to mind when seeing a tribute to Mortician is naturally "Who the fuck would make a tribute to Mortician?" If you can somehow answer that with a convincing answer, the next natural question would by "Why?" And if- by the gods- you somehow find an answer to that question, the third natural question to ask is "No, seriously, God/Jesus/Krishna/George Bush/Dunkin Donuts Man/Whoever is left, why?"

I’m going to try and solve this epic, puzzling dilemma from the get-go. I have a theory about why Mortician has a tribute album, which partially answers why Mortician even exists. It’s quite simple:

Mortician fans are the metal equivalent of juggaloes. Yes, that’s right. Juggaloes. Those pasty, white kids in rural America who put on the retarded clown makeup, drink Faygo, and listen to poorly rapped lyrics about eating Monopoly pieces and shitting Connect Four (or something like that). Mortician fans are merely them, but trade in the face paint for spikes, the Faygo for real drinks, and change the music from poorly conceived rap to 20 minutes of horror film sampling and 10 odd minutes of actual riffing. Juggaloes associate themselves in roving packs of pure, unadulterated retardation, referring to themselves as a family or ninjas. Mortician fans associate themselves in roving packs of pure, unadulterated retardation, referring to themselves as death metal gangs. Juggaloes idolize the moronic ICP, the worst music act in history, whereas Mortician fans idolize Will "Taxi Cab Avenger" Rahmer, a man so retarded he actually pulls stupider shit than Glenn "Strawberry Cupcake" Benton.

So naturally, an act as pathetic as Mortician is somehow going to hit the terminal point of "suck", where if they hit it hard enough and penetrate beyond that point, they will actually end up attracting fans. It’s like that one really pathetic kid in high school. Every school had one. He was worse than all the nerds and creeps combined, yet somehow managed to easily get laid, with women finding his ineptness attractive. He managed to become so pathetic, that this utter shell of a human being bitch slapped the time-space continuum itself, sending him on the other side of the "cool" spectrum and scoring him more ass than a chemist in a meth lab. Acts like Mortician just border this time-space continuum of "suck" and thus attract an audience. An audience of pure stupid.

Alright, so now we know why the demand is here: Mortician is fucking with the fabric of space-time itself. But this doesn’t tell us if this tribute is going to suck any more than Will Rahmer already does, what with his mouth firmly vacuum-sealed around Lucio Fulci’s rotting, puss-ridden cock. In fact, if history has taught us anything about cover songs, it’s that even shitty bands can produce awesome music, so long as someone else is playing their songs. Even if that someone else is another style of music. Look at Venom: Venom’s early material- regardless of its historical importance- really sucked. But when placed in the hands of capable musicians, be them black metal or else, the songs became pure fucking gold. We only need to look at grindcore band Machetazo’s cover of "Black Metal" to see this principal in action.

Unfortunately this is not the case with A Tribute to Mortician. The first main problem is that, despite these bands having every opportunity to really improve on the songs, most of them are still plagued with the needless sampling that just eats away at the time. By the time the songs actually kick in, you’ll have already lost interest in whatever you wanted to see in the cover. Then there is the simple fact that the source material really sucks, as has been said before. The riffing is simplistic and sometimes you could get a really strong rhythm going, but there simply isn’t any hooks or punches to the music. Third track in you got Fleshbomb’s cover of "Zombie Apocalypse" and already I want to just stop the CD and throw in the new Splitter album instead. Frankly, this primitive approach to death metal is nothing but lethargic, and for most of these songs you won’t even care who does the cover. No one really steps up to the challenge of fucking around with the songs to give them that sensation of a colossal monstrosity rising up from the grave to consume all living flesh. Frankly, I would have loved to have heard a Blue Holocaust or Catasexual Urge Motivation take on Mortician, but none of the bands can really supply that kind of enthralling experience with their death metal or goregrind.

This isn’t to say there aren’t a few that aren’t too bad. Rigor Mortis‘ cover of "Dead and Buried" has a bit of a mindless joy to it, and Katalepsy’s sloppy, retardedly brutal death metal cover of "Rabit" makes you want to put on a special helmet, become a contortionist, and repeatedly attempt to suck your own dick while mashing your head through a wooden coffee table that your crotch is under to get to your cock. And I actually enjoyed Lymphatic Phlegm’s cover of "Blown to Pieces". But then the rest of the tracks are just utterly vapid, or are so horrible that self penile mutilation sounds more enticing than listening to them. Sewage Sammich’s cover of "Fog of Death" makes use of electronics/synths/gay ass Nintendo shit that fucks up the brutality for the rest of the song. Inbreeding the Sick’s cover of "Devoured Alive" has a Blue Holocaust feel to it… if Blue Holocaust was a toothless crackwhore masturbating furiously in the soup line at the homeless shelter in front of the little orphan boy sitting directly across from her in the cafeteria. Then you’ll get to 3:15 AM’s… uhhhh… noise grind, that doesn’t even sound like anything. And do we really need three- count them, three- covers of "Silent Night, Deadly Night"?

To compile the problems with the record even more, all the songs have the most spastic production quality ever. You’ll have your stereo set to one fine optimal setting, and then hit someone like Inbreeding the Sick and blow out your otherwise perfectly good speakers. Then you’ll have stuff like Sodomy Torture’s cover of "Drilling for Brains" which is produced so poorly that it sounds like it was recorded in my bathroom, using microphones housed inside all the musicians’ assholes, all of which where in the process of expelling some mean laxative concoction. You can’t hear shit. So you’ll turn your audio setting as far as you can and when you’re not looking, BAM! You’re in the county jail for violating a city noise ordinance after the next song came on.

I could go on and on about how shitty this compilation of covers is, but it’s not worth the effort. Mortician fans will buy this up just for that reason. Why? Because they’re Mortician fans; to them, suck is sexy. Fuck this. Written By: Necro-tron