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Autopsy - Mental Funeral
Review: Musically and artistically this is the peak for Autopsy, who here evolve their gore metal style into a grindcore-influenced experiment that builds songs like bizarre variants on old metal tunes, normal music sent through the tonal grinder and made into churning plunging trudging stuff that speaks its piece through composite riffs and intense patterning in these slow songs of degradation and breakdown.
The entropic crusade presented here is to provide the shock of life and the fear of death and to present as artistic experience the obsession with the morbid in a simply prurient but scientific way. The gut vomited guttural trolling echo of the vocal track only reinforces the sagging antiprogress of the rhythms, and the droning of the guitar shifts the song toward hopelessness at every juncture of mood.
The style here is as evolved as the tugging and surgically messy riffs of the New York school of death metal, but features a heavy metal tonal tendency and guttural, doomish thunder of cavernous resounding recursive structure. Where lead guitar is used it is as showy as the metal gods of the late 1970s, but as the Misfits perverted the crooners of the generation before, Autopsy sickeningly invert heavy metal and turn it into the degraded but aware and nihilistic feral genre of death metal.
Sludge thrown back into a primitive era, Autopsy defined many of the characteristics of modern death metal and contributed extensively to its lexicon of riff patterns. Simultaneously they have left an image of their style as a definition, a taxon, for what they defined in their rampage for musical expression of savage, nihilistic truth of life.