Autopsy – The Headless Ritual Review

By my count, The Headless Ritual took exactly twenty-five seconds to make its argument for being a supremely ass-kicking album. The remaining forty-four minutes or so? Just a victory lap. Autopsy has never seen nearly as many imitators as some of its peers such as Incantation or Entombed, but The Headless Ritual serves as a red-hot notice to even the very best of Autopsy’s descendents that they’d better up their game, because these old gore-revellers are hungrier than they’ve been since Mental Funeral.

But back to that opening: “Slaughter at Beast House” demonstrates nearly every facet of Autopsy’s myriad, slithering charms: Chris Reifert’s consistently unhinged vocal theatrics, a mid-song doom breakdown that morphs into an even sparser bass and drums duet, swarming but melodic chaos in the guitar leads, a production that’s thick and clear but still ten kinds of scuzzy, and a last minute sprint to the finish line that feels less like a race than a blood-spilling collapse. It’s a doozy. Of course, Autopsy has mined these same moves throughout its career, but on The Headless Ritual, the execution is sharper, the riffs bolder, and the internal dynamics much more effective, particularly when compared to the band’s first post-reunion album, 2011’s good but ultimately underwhelming Macabre Eternal.

Probably the most crucial difference between this album and Macabre Eternal is the length. Simply put, the sixty-five minutes of Macabre Eternal was too much Autopsy. The Headless Ritual weighs in at just over forty-four minutes, which is just about perfect. It might sound like a petty complaint, but even a band with as masterful a grasp of both inter-song and inter-album dynamics as Autopsy experiences diminishing returns when things drag on too long.

Since they’ve trimmed the fat, though, The Headless Ritual is simply jammed full of highlights. “She is a Funeral” is a true delight, starting off as a straightforward stomper, but eventually twisting its way through several unexpected sections, trading off between that stomp and a gallop, and a full-band stop to introduce a doomy interlude replete with fluttering lead guitar. A wonderful solo around the song’s midpoint also introduces some hard-hitting lockstep riffing, and Reifert’s tremendously demented vocalizing probably gets the greatest spotlight here (“I was transsssssFIXED!”). The man is downright gleeful in chewing up and spitting out every last word, cracking the bones of the language and sucking out the marrow.

If it isn’t yet abundantly clear, Reifert is even more the band’s MVP here than ever before. “Coffin Crawlers” finds him almost free-styling his vocals over loose fills and great weeping leads, while the rhythm shifts between more restrained sections and relentlessly two-stepping pre-chorus riffing. But even when The Headless Ritual occasionally verges on Autopsy-by-numbers, there’s always something just around the corner to throw the jaded listener off her balance. The opening riff of “Arch Cadaver” is a great example: it sounds familiar enough, but if you try to follow along with it right away, it pushes back with both odd timing and unusual intervals. Similarly, the midsection of “When Hammer Meets Bone” is downright relaxing, but in a threatening sort of way – a single guitar periodically stabs through with a single note, almost promising to break off into a bluesy solo, but it never provides that release.

Autopsy circa 2013 isn’t exactly breaking new ground, but neither are they stagnating. It’s a rare pleasure to see a veteran act return with a solid album, but an even rarer one to have that solid album followed up with a legitimately tremendous one. The Headless Ritual is a consolidation of Autopsy’s many strengths, but never feels quite like an exercise in simply checking the right boxes. Ultimately, this set of songs feels both vital and necessary, and as long as a band this good keeps finding songs that pulsate with such a radiant grotesqueness, they deserve every last goddamn listener they’ve earned.

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

Happily committed to the foolish pursuit of words about sounds. Not actually a dinosaur.

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