Ahhhh, Gorerotted – a band with a name that screams “shitty death metal inside!” So imagine my surprise when I found myself enjoying their track from Relapse’s Contaminated 5.0 compilation, the humorously titled “Gagged, Shagged, and Bodybagged”. Even before that, one of the band members had been the subject of an Infernal Combustion article that talked about his very nonmetal life onstage. Their recent signing to Metal Blade had me in a great state of indifference, but was at least mildly interested in how they would come off with a full disc rather than just the one song. Yeah, not much background, but it’s all I can give you – so sue me.
The first thing I noticed was that ALL the song titles are funny. I don’t mean funny like the scores of gory death metal bands who try to include as many profanities, entrails, and bodily fluids into a song title as possible – I mean funny like “Village People of the Damned” or cutesy little Macabre-esque titles that sound like a nursery rhyme, a la “Hacked in the Back, Dumped in a Sack”. So, points right off the top for not taking themselves too seriously.
Wow, two paragraphs and not a word about the music! Imagine your standard death metal mixed with the tonalities and dual vocal style of gore metal with a little Soilent Green thrown in and that should give you a pretty good idea. Furthermore, opening track “Zombie Graveyard Rape Bonanza” starts off with a sample of the Cryptkeeper, a fitting way to start this disc, as the humor of the band and the morbid Muppet seem to be along the same lines. A few tracks later we get the lamentful “Can’t Fit Her Limbs in the Fridge”. OK, so it’s not a sad song, but c’mon – how many of us have been in that situation before, unable to cram the dismembered pieces of a lady into our refrigerator? Umm . . . err . . . I mean, what a horrible thing to think about! Speaking of horrible things to think about, how about “Fuck Your Arse with Broken Glass”? After the painful visuals pass, I had a startling Welcome Back, Kotter flashback, to Vinnie Barbarino’s most famous one-liner from that show.
Overall: good, clean, gory fun. If you like your metal with a grain of salt, you’re likely to enjoy this disc. Musically, it breaks no real new ground, but the overall attitude and the humor are certainly refreshing in a genre where the bands and fans take themselves so seriously that they forget to have fun.
