England’s Porkfarm unleash their Deepsend debut EP. Blood Harvest is a blistering blast of gory death/grind that blends dashes of early Gorerotted with a host of classic death metal acts and some grindcore dirtiness to boot. What helps to separate Porkfarm (love that name) from the remainder of the pigs is sheer unrelenting energy and power–they bash and crash in equal parts with technical flair and with vicious imprecision. (That’s that grinding ferocity showing through.) It’s like being gutted with a kitchen knife instead of a scalpel—it’s not a clean cut; there’s a greater amount of force behind it, more primal than graceful, but yet it’ll spill your guts on the floor exactly the same. Tremolo-picked moments of slicing savagery are interspersed with slower moments of brutal bludgeoning, and vocalist The Crap (with help from drummer The Butcher) spits his words in a dry growl that’s occasionally broken up with a high-pitched screech. The blasts are machine-precise, and when the band drops into a slow grind, it’s absolutely staggering. And all that adds up to what? Well, dammit, it adds up to exactly how I like my death metal, with all the subtlety of an axe to the skull…
Not to sound too enthusiastic, but there are six songs here, all of which are good and most of which are truly killer (“I Shall Hack,” “Sickening Dismemberment,” “Suffer”), and it all whips by in less than twenty minutes time. There’s nothing here that’s done wrong, that’s done less than brilliantly, except that the production could maybe be tightened up, punched up a bit, and the whole thing could be longer. I’m really not complaining though… Blood Harvest is death metal done right, so I’ll take what I get here.
In a year filled with some killer death metal records by the genre’s giants, Porkfarm (along with fellow Deepsenders Dawn Of Demise and Greece’s Dead Congregation) are one of the handful of new acts I’ve run across that compete. Yeah, many of these bands wear their influences on their sleeves, but Porkfarm are among those few that are still good enough to transcend that visible lineage.
Here’s to ’em–hope the pigs can keep this up.
Fucking smashing.
