Mephitic Corpse – Sickness Attracts Sickness Review

“Mephitic” is a word the definition of which, were I not into this crazy world of ugly music, I would quite likely never know. Turns out it means “foul-smelling” or “noxious,” and it also turns out that my junior high teachers were wrong and I actually am learning something from all this noise… Finally.

I can’t vouch for how the band smells — and I’m okay with that, really — but I can say with certainty that their music sounds like it smells bad… and I’m okay with that, too. The label proudly proclaims this to be Extremely Rotten, and the press materials describe Mephitic Corpse as “vomit grind,” and both of those do as grand a job describing it as I ever could, anyway.

The band’s first full-length after two demos in six-ish years, Sickness Attracts Sickness is simply nasty. It’s putrid, grinding death, coated with the kind of icky production that makes the whole thing feel fuzzier than a crypt full of moldy excrement. The guitars and bass are bathed in an almost comically excessive level of distortion, rumbling along with all the power and subtlety of a bulldozer, with pinch harmonics squirming their way up through the muck like hungry worms. Eric Liewald’s drumming is ferocious; his drum sounds are live and real, on the cusp of — but never succumbing to — the brutal-death ngping-snare sound. Matt Rose’s vocals are inhumanly low, most immediately redolent of David Mikkelsen of Sequestrum / Undergang / Phrenelith, who himself conveniently makes a guest appearance on “Heart In Tinfoil.”

All but a couple of these eleven songs hover around the two-minute mark, short bloody chunks of grinding brutality, with only the slightest of fuzzed-over differences to distinguish one from the next. Scrape away the rotten mire, and these riffs would still crush, but it’s in that fuzz that Sickness Attracts Sickness is truly defined. By the time “Gutpuked Maggot Treatment” rolls around, you’ll need to scrub your ears out with a brush, but one some level, you’ll know it was worth it.

A half-hour of positively puking death / grind brutality — truthfully, it’s not the most innovative record around, and it’s not the most adventurous, but neither does it claim to be. It is what it says it is: It’s noxious, yes. it’s rotten, yes. It’s vomitous, yes. It’s thoroughly enjoyable, too, and it’s not for the faint of heart or stomach or ear, for sure.

But that’s what you came here for, isn’t it?