Cartilage – Tales From The Entrails: A Necrology Review

If the band name and the album title and the album cover and songs like “Frothed Vomit Slosh” and “Globs Of Glimmering Gore” didn’t clue you in already… well, what we’ve got here is goregrind, kids, that wondrous blend of death metal and grind, riffy and snarling and metaphorically spattered with bodily fluids of every description.

Picking up on the threads originally spun by Carcass, then filtered through Exhumed and Impaled and Frightmare, California’s Cartilage doesn’t necessarily dig any fresh graves with this particular sound, but I’m guessing no one’s really looking to gore metal for innovation. If you’re like me, you look to gore metal for scalpel-sharp riffs and pathological hooks, medical dictionary goofy gross-outs and the undeniable fun of quality death/grinding, and Tales From The Entrails has each of those in enough quantity to satisfy all but the most bloodthirsty of grinders. It builds on the groundwork laid by Dialect Of The Dead and The Deader The Better, closer in overall attack to the latter of those, the more recent of the two Cartilage two full-lengths so far.

Opening with its own “trailer” (c’mon, guys, you missed the “entrailer” pun here), Tales is really just four songs, for a grand total of about ten minutes, a quick and dirty shot of surgical savagery. What’s most readily apparent comparing this to Deader and Dialect is that Cartilage is simply getting better at what they do – Tales is a sharpened attack, better produced, better composed, better performed, the sound of a band taking the next step forward. Mark Wallace’s vocals run the gamut from the expected gurgles, death grunts, and maniacal cackling, and the variety is greater here than on previous offerings, adding an even greater element of the horror theatrics that make gore metal such irresistibly goofy fun. Both “Frothed Vomit Slosh” and “Globs Of Glimmering Gore” are straight-ahead gore-grinders, while “Ape-U-Tator” intertwines the 911 call from a chimpanzee attack with the EP’s best riffs, a spiraling twisted mass of pinch harmonics and blast beating.

While they may not be the most original band on the butcher’s block, Cartilage does what they do with flash and skill and enough silly sickness (or perhaps, with enough sick silliness, and possibly both) that Tales From The Entrails doesn’t feel played out or warmed over. It’s the strongest Cartilage release so far, and though there’s not all that much of it (I’d happily take another half-dozen songs just like these, so hopefully more is yet to come), for those in the market for more gore, Tales From The Entrails gets the blood flowing…