Mortal Wound – The Anus Of The World Review

[Front cover artwork by Karina]

A depiction of a Mortal Wound super-fan:

If you are lucky enough to have parental units that counted your safety and prosperity as a top priority amidst your youth, then you’re probably quite familiar with all sorts of rules and decrees whose intention it was to keep you alive and mentally productive. Bike helmets, TV / streaming restrictions, heavily marshmallowed cereal bans, etc. ad infinitum. If you’re like most humans, though, you found ways to circumvent such protective measures in an effort to: 1) maximize fun, and 2) bond with the under-appreciated privilege that is stupidity.

Here, have some samples of fun stupidity from the perspective of an 80s’ kid: roman candle wars in the woods (related: caulking guns are excellent for launching bottle rockets); using the tall, neon orange safety flags required for our bikes as jousting lances in the street; swiping plywood from construction sites to build terrifically unsafe ramps for grimy creek jumps. You know, the sort of risks most kids undertake in an effort to test the boundaries of intellect, and risks that plant the seed for approaching adult(ish) stupidities such as… Oh, I dunno… two-story beer bongs, happily leaping out of an airplane, or willingly getting a significant piece of metal pierced through your bird. So, with due deference owed to those sublime moments when reason is violated in favor of driving golf carts directly into water hazards for kicks, let us now take a moment to embrace the favorable side of stupidity together, my fellow stupid idiots.

Now, let’s be very clear from the jump: I am not about to infer that Mortal Wound is a stupid band, nor am I hinting at the possibility that the members of Mortal Wound spend half their day every single day watching an old VHS tape version of The Master of Disguise on loop. They have, however, sold whatever part of the soul is necessary to win the rights to that glorious sweet-spot between Hacked Up for Barbecue and Eaten Back to Life, which all but guarantees you will lose about 300 points off your SAT score after listening to The Anus of the World. Put a different way, and in an effort to paint a visual representation of the album, imagine Baphomet’s The Dead Shall Inherit morphed into a human form and spending a solid half hour pushing on the pull door of a funeral home in hopes of snacking on trash-canned organs.

“Found Dead in a Bush” (hey, at least you were found) is the only song released from the record to date, but it does indeed do a marvy job of showcasing every reason why every listener should be required to crank songs like these from the windows of a van in the parking lot of a local Mensa meetup. I think the vocalist might actually be a toilet? If not that, then perhaps a 700lb grizzly bear slowly meeting its maker after eating its way through every guy nicknamed “Tiny” at a Golden Corral buffet somewhere in Jockstrap, Nevada. Big, wet flakes of rotted bowel rust retch from this guy’s gullet, and he uses a perfect allotment of breakout YARPs and UH-AUGHs throughout the album to break up the relentlessly deep glottal scraping.

Riffs are clearly a primary concern here, and this particular Anus happens to be packed with a variety that’s just as infectiously scooting as they are grossly decayed. Sometimes the riffs are weirdly happy, like throughout “Tunnel Rat,” which might be the first gangrened death metal song to kick off with a pedal steel, and other times the riffs are meaner than an old barn cat with a UTI. The breakout that lands 3:05 into “Drug Filled Cadaver?” Are you shittin’ me, Anus? (Not literally.)

There’s a song called “Born Again Hard,” for fuck’s sake, which is either an ode to getting a pontifical romantic handshake or a ballad about rising from the swamp with a rager stiff enough to lift 10 pounds of seagrass. Either way, it’s an effective song, and one that, like the rest of the album, perfectly balances rotted slowness with measures of speedy speediness that speed along like some beefy golden retriever cartoon-running across a hardwood floor to snuffle down a bowl nuggetized hooves and arseholes.

There are nice solos on this album! I mean, Yngwie won’t exactly be sweating through his girdle and right into Ferrari leather in fear of being dethroned or anything, but Anus does emit a bevy of surprisingly fit and melodic noodle breakouts, all of which are brief enough to ensure no one would dare call any of these songs “pretty.” And yes, virtually every other corner gets decorated with more movie samples than a 4 hour Mortician set at a knife convention.

What the hell else would any genius need to know? Not only is this record proudly not rocket science, it’s… going to court smelling like rag weed and wearing a Tomb of the Mutilated longsleeve, and then getting interviewed by the local news afterward. “Show me in the law books where throwin’ an M80 into the koi pond of a Japanese restaurant is illegal.”

Bottom (wink) line: The Anus of the World is a glorious embrace of sheer death metal lunkheadedness, and therefore required listening.