Customer Reviews

Reek of Putrefaction

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This cd is the one which invented the goregrind subgenre.The album artwork sickened me in a way that no other death band has ever done.A truly ferocious metal masterpiece is the only thing that could describe these guys.If you could get past the bad production then you will realize that this is a great album.The songs are fast and in your face brutal.The vocals are just insane and you will find hundreds of bands which try to recreate them.I deeply miss them not being in the scene any longer.Best wishes go out to all the band members and especially to ken owen who is recovering from being ill.GO OUT AND GET THIS YOU SICK FREAKS!!!

This is the first and best release from those lovable vegan peace-punks; Carcass. In my opinion it is the most intense grindcore album ever made. By the way, early Carcass such as this is not death metal-it's grindcore which makes it more akin to punk, hardcore, and crust. In fact members of Carcass were in some of the pioneering bands that transformed dispunk and crust into grindcore. The apparent relation between grind and death is really an afterthough- a sort of parallel evolution between punk and metal(with some crossover influence of course especially in the late 80's early 90's. The raw lo-fi production just makes this album all that more punk. with this album Carcass set the bar.

This is the first album of one of the most important death-metal bands. Carcass can be consider as the inventors, with this album, of the forensic, gore, medical and autopsies lyrics; and add the collages of rotten limbs, tongues, heads and decaying corpses on the covers of the first two albums. You can find on "Reek..." %100 pure grindcore. This album has 22 songs in 29 minutes, and you have to listen to it a couple of times to make a difference between one song and another. Well, grindcore is a style that is recognized not for the musical skills or for being technical. Fast-blazing drums, gutural voices, and a guitar that sounds like Tv with no signal(SSSHHH). And to all these, I have to mention the horrible production, that doesn't help. But the gore atmosphere and lyrics will make you smile. I bought this record after "Heartwork", and "Necroticism...", and it took me a long time to digest. Now I play it on and on. Anyway, for grindcore fans(sick people) and REALLY Carcass' fans.

While the songs on Carcass' first release are an often brilliant mixture of caffeine-addled grind and death-metal, it's usually difficult to tell because of the horrible, microphone-in-a-trashcan production. I would recommend the far superior and better-produced "Symphonies of Sickness" to new Carcass initiates. I have the original CD release of "Symphonies" that contains "Reek" (Along with the autopsy-collage album cover) and the difference in production between the two is like night and day. A.C. have used a similar-sounding production style on a few of their releases, akin to being stuck under three feet of sludge while the band plays above you. In A.C.'s case it just seems to be a parody. It's a tragedy for Carcass fans that this material was produced so poorly. I'd welcome a remaster with open arms, in this case it just might be a lost cause.

Despite what the rest of the losers here have said, this is a brilliant album. It's pure grind/death and it shreds. With gurgling vocals, upbeat punkish tempos, and heavy riffs as weighty as shrapnel, this is one of the band's best albums. This, Heartwork, Symphonies, and Necroticism are what made this band the gods they were. I wish they'd reunite.

Reek of Putrefaction can only be described as a soothing flow of harmonious sounds which engulfs your body in a cocoon of relaxation. The heavenly vocal trifecta of Ken Owen, Jeff Walker and Bill steer are akin to a mother's delicate tender and soothing voice while she sings to her new born baby. The cleansing properties of this album cannot be overlooked. Just one listen will lift the heavy burdens of stress, anger and even pain and replace them with a sense of fulfillment and giddy excitement. It is rumored that a daily dose of Reek of Putrefaction will reverse the aging process and cure all sorts of maladies and malignant deceases. Do yourself a favor and purchase this album and begin your life anew!

"The Reek of Putrefaction" is impossible to intelligently defend from any rational standpoint. Unlike your sophisticated modern death metal albums, this is a senselessly brutal, simplistic mass of grinding noise. Even in this remastered form, the guitars and bass meld into a single distorted mass overlaying the spastic, primitive drumming. Little will likely stick with you after listening. In short, I describe it in precisely the way that critics would deride grindcore generally, and in precisely the way that I would critcize grindcore albums that I don't like.

And yet this album is awesome. It's an absurdly energetic, infectious release that is still truly brutal 20 years after the original release, and also one of the funnest extreme metal albums I've ever heard. All of the Carcass releases after this, even SoS, are a bit overly sterile and calculated. Reek of Putrefaction, however, is unadulterated intensity, an album driven by the force of sound alone. Not songs, not even riffs. Just aural force.

A classic. Mandatory listening for all extreme metal fans.

Repulsion are rightly considered the true originators of grindcore and for good reason, but in 1987 three young Brits took their influence and made things just a bit faster, a bit gorier and ultimately even more brutal, if that were possible. In the worldwide death metal scene that was just in its infant stages at the time, Carcass were something truly new and never before heard. They were almost unclassifiable, and were lumped in with the burgeoning "Brit-core" scene of the time (descended from hardcore punk) that included the likes of an early Napalm Death, Extreme Noise Terror, Electro Hippies, Unseen Terror and Intense Degree. This was partly due to the band's vegan beliefs and politics that hearkened back to earlier British anarcho-punk bands such as Crass and Conflict. In short, Carcass were highly intelligent guys whose music had a hidden political message of abstinence from a meat-based diet, and were far from out only to headbang (though I'm sure they did a fair amount of that too). They were throughout their career a thinking man's version of death metal.

If you want to look back even further than "Reek Of Putrefaction" into the band's origins, I highly recommend that you seek out the Carcass demo compilation CD put out within the last couple years "The Gore Gallery Of Demos" which contains the band's debut 1987 tape "Flesh Ripping Sonic Torment," which features original vocalist Sanjiv, and he is no doubt one of the absolute originators of the endlessly imitated guttural death metal gurgle.

By December of 1987 though, when the band entered Birmingham's Rich Bitch studios to record "Reek Of Putrefaction," he was gone and guitarist Bill Steer took over on low growls and proved to be a more than competent replacement.

What a classic this record is. Those who complain of the poor production may in fact be missing the point. You have to take this in its original context as an LP. It was MEANT to be as sonically repulsive and horrific as its original cover art (a far cry from the squeaky-clean sanitized version that appears here on Amazon). It is the sound of pure audio vomit put to music. This is really gory guttural death metal at its absolute genesis that could only have been conceived in the minds of three genius teenage outcasts, and they were LIGHT YEARS ahead of their time people.

It's inconceivable how many bands' sounds stem from this one record. The work that would immediately follow this album's release (in the summer of 1988) from the likes of Sore Throat, Xysma, General Surgery, and Regurgitate all echoed the discordant wall of sound found on this LP.

One thing that's often understated about this recording is just how musically advanced these guys already were even at this early stage. If you doubt, witness Steer's brilliant guitar interludes on tracks like "Burnt To A Crisp" and "Oxidised Razor Masticator."

Far too extreme for its time, "Reek" was never even given the liberty of being released on a CD by itself in its entirety until a full seven years after it was recorded, and even then, without the essential original sleeve art as I said (Earache finally wised up and reissued it with the original covers in 2002).

All in all, if you are at all into gore or death metal, you need to own this album. An all-time personal favorite.

I can see why some people dont like this kind of music or gore in generall... Its not for every one but anyways, carcass's reek of putrefaction was the begining of something wonderfull i like to call goregrind. Pure sickness...

Carcass is one of those bands that can't seem to put out bad music. The production is not as good on "Reek of Putrefaction" as some of their other titles, but the integrity in their music still shines through.