When it comes to death metal, I mostly find myself gravitating towards the gross and putrid, the fetid and icky, the old-school sound of rotting flesh and rotten riff. There’s a time and place for the wall-of-sound heaviness and intricate tech displays, but it’s always the time and place for the sound of bodies bursting forth from the coffin, dragging lifeless limbs behind them, clawing and crawling out of the crypts and the mausoleums in search of the blood of the living…
Although Final State’s production might truthfully be a bit more well-rounded, Cascading Inferno certainly captures the carrion-stench putridity of the band’s sound — the guitars are sharp, carving, biting; Evan Hartung’s vocals are a dry-throated rasping growl; drummer Jackson (Andrew? Action? Browne?) roils and rolls, switching between the blastbeats and slug-speed trudges with ease. Songs shift and twist; pinch harmonics boil up from within those churning riffs; a scant pair of Hanneman-Azagthoth-ian guitar lead / whammy bar workouts spray across “Realm Of Malevolence” and “Euphoric Insanity,” while closer “Mechanics Of Murder” opens with some nicely dissonant lead melodies.
Of course, all of the above has been done before, and adherence to formula is a bit of a double-edged sword. The very same walls that line Putrisect’s chosen grave are those that constrain them a bit, as well. Still, the only real criticism I could level is that they don’t really push any boundaries, that there are quite a few old-school death metal acts plying a similar trade, even if Putrisect is as good as most and better than many.
Putrisect plays old-school gnarly, filthy death metal, and they do it well enough to keep these twenty-six minutes interesting, and while there’s certainly currently no shortage of bands operating within the same paradigm, if you find yourself leaning towards some rotting-flesh ugliness of the Autopsy / Incantation mold, Cascading Inferno will certainly feed the need.
