Wow, it's been a while since I've posted anything "heavy" on the ol' blog (much less posted anything at all but that's a different story) so a big welcome to the creepy month of October with a 38-track slab of good ol' pathological goregrind to ruin your day. I gotta admit I was pretty excited when I heard the opening "Symphony For A Casket Full Of Nematodes" - a brutal lo-fi goregrind neo-classic with a solid riff and great blasts of noise and gurgles. Unfortunately the rest of the record doesn't hold up quite as strongly. Imagine really early cassette-deck Regurgitate (a la Concrete Human Torture) and you'll get the idea. Occasionally a RGTE-esque riff will really stand out ("Anatomophysiological Deterioration" for one) but there is a lot of slogging through the swamp until you hit the satisfactory closer "Enter The Realm Of Cadaver... Dissection." I really prefer the slower grooves over the blast beat nonsense (which ultimately becomes terribly tiring) and there's enough variation between the nearly forty 1-minute tracks to keep Stages Of Decomposition listenable. The duo behind Thanatopsis includes Neto from the forgettable Brazilian gorenoise outfit HxAxSx and Pelle from the equally obscure (and I'm sure just as unpleasant) Swedish one-man grindshow Shitfaced. I'm actually curious as to whether the two guys made the trans-global flights to record together or if this was a collaborative email/snail mail effort. Either way it absolutely blows away anything either of them have done in the past and there are some other splits and comps featuring the band out there waiting for you to check out...
