Customer Reviews

Dusk

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For nostalgia purposes, it's usually customary to look back about 20 years and fondly recall the music, movies and personalities that dominated the scene two decades prior. This being September 2011, and me having been a teen ardently into the burgeoning death metal scene in the early 1990s, let's go back to the ultimate peak year for the sound, 1991, and in particular, to Australia.

Along with bands like Corpse Molestation, the Melbourne scene was thriving and perhaps the best band to emerge from this particular corner of the world was Disembowelment, who released their debut demo "Mourning September" in late 1990.

One of their first forays into a "real" studio though was nearly one year later, when they entered Melbourne's Double Tea Studios on August 3rd, 1991, and recorded their second demo, "Deep Sensory Procession into Aural Fate," completing it in the course of only two days.

Wow! Now THIS recording is what death metal is all about. From the first demo, Renato Gallina's purposely reverbed vocals have gotten tenfold more guttural, brutal and downright scary. The band have also clearly improved in the songwriting department, producing but two compositions, "the Tree of Life and Death" and "a Burial at Ornans," with the full demo clocking in at around 21 minutes. The band here clearly seem to be influenced by New York's doom pioneers Winter, resulting in more slow, bloodcurdling doomy death, but accentuated by the occasional, truly devastating 50-megaton blasts of drummer Paul Mazziotta. While Disembowelment were at the end of the day a traditional, classic brutal death/grind band of the highest order, their music could also be seen as more than a little atmospheric, creating a cold, bleak sense of darkness and despair in the listener, and perfect music to accompany your blackest depressions. It's no wonder, if you see the band's list of influences on their MySpace page, which range from classic ultra-brutal death metal bands of their day such as Mortician, Rottrevore and Immolation, to more avant-garde, non-metal groups like Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins. Very gracious of these guys to give credit in such a way to the bands that preceded them, and this compendium of influences is what really made Disembowelment stand out greatly from the rest of the pack.

This "Deep Sensory Procession" demo got the band the attention of U.S. label Relapse Records, who rereleased it in 1992 as an EP entitled "Dusk," with one new track added. Disembowelment would then go on to later rerecord both songs from the demo for their debut full-length for Relapse, "Transcendence into the Peripheral" (1993), but I've always preferred these rawer, more evil sounding original versions to the slightly more polished and restrained album versions.

All in all, early Disembowelment remains some of the best and most brutal death/doom ever recorded, now 20 years later. Highly recommended to all fellow underground death metal fanatics, and in particular fans of the peak early '90s years.

(Final sidenote: Amazon currently has artwork for a different, unrelated album to accompany this listing for the "Dusk" CD. Maybe this review will give them heads up to correct this and add the correct cover to this listing.)