Mortual – Altar Of Brutality Review

[Cover art by Marcelo Almeida]

Happy birthday, America! Lets celebrate by talking about how Central and South America are making the U.S.’ OSDM scene look like a bunch of little baby bitches.

Today’s case study in southern hemisphere excellence is Mortual’s Altar of Brutality. While many an OSDM troupe zeroes in on one particular band for inspiration (please for the love of fuck stop making Bolt Thrower clones), the bands down yonder have more appropriately captured the spirit and sounds of death metal’s infancy. Mortual is deeply Floridian in nature without the Florida Guy baggage.

Mortual meeting Frozen Soul in a green room (probably):

This isn’t to say the Costa Rican trio doesn’t wear their influences on their sleeves, but more so that they’re better at blending them together and zeroing in on a sound and energy representative of what actual old-school death metal was. What we have here is a potent cocktail of Altars of Madness alcohol with the juice of early Deicide as a mixer, along with spritzes and garnishments of a few other deathly mainstays in the genre. Altar of Brutality is just the right amount of dirty and raw as it brims with a fiery energy equivalent to the youthful vigor of the late 80s and early 90s. While the bottom end is stronger than the legendary Scott Burns albums of that era, the general sound of this album would be right at home alongside the classics. This is immediately apparent with the Schizophrenia-esque tom roll that opens the door to a maze of tormenting riffs kicking off the album in “Mortual Rites.” Look again at that song title and the album name. I mean, come on, they’re not being remotely subtle about who their heroes are. Every element of this is the music equivalent of:

Jesus Christ, two GIFs within three paragraphs. This review is Millennial as fuck. I’m sorry. So, who are some of those other influences that rear their bedeviled heads? Well, “Divine Monstrosity” is yet another unsubtle name, as the track would feel right at home in In Dark Purity‘s neighborhood. And, when the band decides to slow things down to an ugly trudge, it’s fair to imagine John McEntee’s ears start burning. While many of the sounds and elements at play are predictable, much of the songwriting is not. “Fiendish Visions” exemplifies this well. It goes something like this after the first minute: Meathead chugging, guitar riff stands alone to rile up the crowd, sweet tom fill, bring the song back in full, just kidding it’s time for an isolated vocal emanation, slooooooow the song down to a violent trudge and watch heads roll off necks, let hideous feedback flit in and out, bring the tom roll in again but make it slo-mo, make the listener think the trudge will get trudgier but SYKE it’s full-tilt blast time, and then roll out a chaotic slew of overlapping leads.

Oh yeah, the leads! Justin Corpse and Master Killer, who each play bass and guitar while contributing vocals, have definitely studied at the school of Trey Azagthoth. The general approach is short, searing and squiggly leads that have that high, thin tone helping them to shoot through the mix and zap your synapses. While the majority are short-lived, the duo does not approach them in a singular way. The band adeptly uses no leads, a quick shot, back-to-backs, overlapping or even duels as they see fit. The aforementioned “Divine Monstrosity” has an excellent sequence that feels like these two were in the practice room screwing around trading shred barbs and then said, “You know what? Let’s put something slow and dramatic behind that. We’re keeping this nonsense!” Also, is Trey in this band? The album closes with a short instrumental track of ominous, echoey clean guitars and that’s some pure lava-brained nonsense.

Sure, the riffs are good and the leads are fun, but drummer Chalo deserves a shoutout too. He knows exactly when to be militant, flailing, blitzing, smooth, dragging, steady, chaotic, and so on and so forth. The man is a machine built for making death metal riffs more potent.

In summary, Mortual good.

I have an idea. Let’s invite every single ICE agent to Alligator Alcatraz and then saw Florida off of the continental U.S. Bugs Bunny style. Then we can invite Costa Rica to float on up here and start this whole death metal journey all over again. Is that Born Again Satanism? I’m drunk. What am I writing? Go fuck yourself.

Come on up, Mortual, I want to see what you make this scene look like over the next 30 years.