Blast Rites: Organ Failure – Neurologic Determination Of Death Review

I recommended this Organ Failure record to a friend a few weeks back – a friend I know to have impeccable taste and not be unduly squeamish about these things I’ve come to love, the gory and the gross. The response I got was this: He checked out the album on his lunch break, but as he ate, the combination of physical food – particularly, he noted, of raw tomatoes – and the sound of Ted Soukop’s inhuman wet-splatter gurgling started to get to him, and he would have to revisit the album when he wasn’t trying to eat.

So… mission accomplished, Organ Failure. Remember, kids: Goregrind + raw tomatoes = a step too far.

Neurologic Determination Of Death is the debut full-length for this Chicago quartet, and yes, it’s gurgly goregrind goodness. The guitars are a fuzzy fetid mush, in the best way, the sticky goo that holds together the pounding rhythms and those gurgled plops and burps. The bass is a gnarled clanking in the dead center of it all, part of the fuzz when the noise becomes a wall, distinct and distorted to hell in the fleeting quieter moments. Those drums are smashing and crashing, blasthappy and thrashing, but a significant portion of Neurologic Determination moves at a crushing pace, and some of the album’s best moments (opener “Red Market,” for example, with it’s almost Obituary-ian swing) are those where drummer Max Rivera brings the swagger.

For further examples, I offer you these: The killer back-to-back cuts of “Gross Examination” and “Extracting Fluids Postmortem,” the former buoyed by a simple and stout Sean Scott guitar figure and the latter built on a rumbling Ryan Reynolds bass line. Or the doomy opening drive of “Cold Storage,” with its blink-and-you-miss-’em squealed harmonics. Or the chunky stomping bits of “Prescribed Lacerations,” sandwiched between Rivera’s pounding uptempos for a little mid-song crunch. Or the noxious, almost Incantation-y ugliness that powers “Emptied And Buried,” a heavily doomed out take on gore that eschews grinding in favor of a leaden deathy trudge. Throw an always-welcome Regurgitate cover on top of this pile of pathological putridity, and well, I’m pretty much sold on Neurologic Determination Of Death, fellas.

With Soukop doing double duty in death-grinders Melting Rot, and Rivera the sole member of Midwest mincing maestros Gastropod, Organ Failure brings a rock-solid underground grind pedigree to the table, and they’ve certainly delivered a fine and fun slab of goregrind for their first time up. For those on the lookout for more nastiness, look no further for fifteen minutes of fuzzy foulness.

Just remember to hold the tomatoes.