It’s been less than a year since the last Autopsy record – California’s greatest blood-splattered death metallers certainly aren’t wasting any time. But then again, they’re repeating themselves, so it can’t really be all that time-consuming at this point…
So if you’re looking for a short-form review, there it is: Tourniquets, Hacksaws And Graves avoids unexpected turns like it avoids Oxford commas. It’s pretty much Autopsy doing Autopsy… again.
And that’s probably enough to make some of you shrug your shoulders, and yet it’s also enough to make some of you purchase Tourniquets forthwith.
Even though the album has some flaws, the latter of those is the correct answer, I would say – and then I’ll admit that I’m pretty strongly biased, forever in favor of this filth. The older I get, the more I appreciate the type of gnarled grotesquery that is Autopsy at its best. Theirs is a straightforward take on classic-style death metal, as un-tech as possible and never rudimentary to any detrimental degree, and then impaled by noxious crawling doom. In their rawness, I find Autopsy to be exponentially more visceral, palpably more vile than many death metal bands. Each grimy riff and slightly sloppy beat sounds as if it’s dripping with the aural equivalent of some half-congealed bodily fluid of dubious origin, and strangely, that’s a good thing. The cold and clinical side of death metal has its place, for sure, but when in doubt, give me this fetid mess, a worm-ridden soundtrack for the rotting:
All is not perfect, however: Of Tourniquets’ twelve tunes, “All Shall Bleed” is a toss-off minute of harmonizing guitars that contributes nothing but an introduction to the plodding “Deep Crimson Dreaming,” which wanders through half of its playing time before devolving into a drum-and-bass vamp that’s less of a welcome sideways turn and more as if the band didn’t know where to go and started screwing around to compensate. Most of Tourniquets’ middle tunes – from “After The Cutting” through “Deep Crimson Dreaming” – blurs into one giant Autopsy-by-numbers blur, with a riff or a beat here or there emerging momentarily, but nothing quite sticking out for long.
When Tourniquets cuts, it cuts deep, even if part of it is duller than expected. Overall, it mostly just feels rushed, too soon to release a follow-up to The Headless Ritual, and certainly so if that follow-up wasn’t as strong, which it isn’t. Were Tourniquets shortened by half, it would’ve made an excellent stopgap EP. Still, there are worse things than Autopsy going through their motions. Just think of it like this: It’s an EP with some bonus tracks crammed in the middle. Let’s hope the next one is more focused.
