Blast Rites: Hemorrhoid – Raw Materials Of Decay Review

Thankfully, I’ve never yet had to deal with hemorrhoids, but I hear they’re a total pain in the ass…

Boom. Mic drop. Thanks. I’m here all week.

But seriously, folks. These bloody Portland, Oregon-based death-grinders (with members also in Cemetery Lust and Nekro Drunkz) bring you their first full-length, after Demo 2023 last year, and damned if Raw Materials Of Decay doesn’t seriously kick some… well, you know what. It’s appropriately raw and incredibly nasty, like the Good Lord intended; filled with blastbeating mayhem and yet enough thrashing groove to keep everything moving along with all the grin-inducing goodness, all built upon bonepiles of gnarled Reek Of Putrefaction-y riffs and vocals that range from the vomitous to the occasional higher-pitched pained grunt.

From the instrumental opening of “Hemorrhoidal Removal Surgery” onward, Raw Materials Of Decay is an exercise in classic goregrind kick-assery, easily topping that 2023 demo in all ways, in production and in song quality and in awesome awesome album art. (Pizza The Hutt, anyone?) The production is vile, rough, but also thick and well balanced; the guitars are putrid, fuzzed out and gnarled; the bass is a distorted wall beneath the drums, which are live but not overly pingy. Squalling guitar leads bubble up from the mire from time to time, offsetting the carving riffs with some noxious “melodies,” but mostly these Raw Materials are built upon those riffs and those blasts and all those gurgles, and Hemorrhoid gets every one of them right.

To cite my sources, witness only the vicious “Ultimate Commode Of Chaos & Carnage,” which I’m pretty sure I peed in a few times during last week’s Hell’s Heroes festival. Or the swaggering follow-up of the perfectly titled “Moderate To Severe Plaque Psoriasis,” with its weirdly wet squirting squishes throughout. “Rancid Rectal Rupture,” “Dante’s Fecal Inferno,” “Festering Blood Pit”… you know what you’re getting here, ultimately, but it’s so gross and catchy that it’s damned near irresistible, fitting neatly against the likes of your Septages, your Pharmacists, your Sequestrums, without treading too closely atop any of them. (Or as much as one could ever say that within the closely constricted confines of gory death / grind, anyway.)

Fifteen songs, twenty-five minutes, a sample from “The Brood” (I’m pretty sure), scads of solid goregrind riffs… What more could anyone want from a band called Hemorrhoid?

One-hundred percent worthy for anyone interested in the bloodier side of grossness.