Label - Unique Leader
Release Date - 8 July 2022
Words - Tony Bliss
If you’re searching for your next hit of horrible, gelatinous noise, you would understandably be drawn towards the sort of surgical death metal funhouse that a name like Organectomy suggests. Hailing from NZ’s Christchurch City, the band are as wilfully fucked up and violent as the next blood ‘n’ bile slam specialists, however, their surprisingly high-grade onslaught offers an all too rare glimpse into why brutal death metal need not be as one-dimensional as we might assume.
Indeed, those in the know will tell you that scene tastemakers Unique Leader Records aren’t in the business of putting out guff, and it is clear from ‘Concrete’s first snare hit that Organectomy sit right at home at the Unique Leader round table, the band balancing caveman bludgeon and tech-death precision with the skill of battle-scarred veterans. It is when we reach third track ‘Cult Of Excess’ where things get really interesting however, a backbone of righteous slam twisted into perverse and absurd new shapes, and occasionally even grasping at the alien fringes of black metal's outer realms with its stridently sprawling assault.
The band go a step further on ‘Ulcerborne’. Five minutes of lop-sided savagery, this is an entirely instrumental netherworld which touches on that atmospheric sense of the ‘other’ normally reserved for the more avant-garde of our world. Make no mistake, Organectomy spend the majority of ‘Nail Below Nail’ spewing their deathly hate-sludge into our lug ‘oles (the unholy triumvirate of ‘Entranced By Calamity’, ‘Ill-Conceived’ and ‘Entrapped Savagery’ is a particularly snortin’ and ‘snarlin’ good time, and the groove laden ‘Malicious Contortions’ delights in crushing your spine with a landslide of beatdowns), and whilst these fearsome Kiwi’s more than prove themselves to be students of Devourment, Disgorge and early Deeds Of Flesh, ‘Nail Below Nail’ is evidence that in the right hands, the slam blueprint is just as ripe for mangling and enhancing as any subgenre we could name.
8/10
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