Autopsy
Acts Of The Unspeakable

This album could be defined as oxymoronic: it is indeed barely adequate yet at the same time unmissable.

The Autopsy themselves are a mediocre band yet at the same time unmissable. I realize that at first this statement may seem nebulous, so let me explain it better.

This band, hailing from California, is the creature born in the late eighties from the mind of Chris Reifert, drummer on the first work of Death, "Scream Bloody Gore," and later founder of Abscess. The genre proposed is that of a very simple and unambitious Death metal, almost primitive, enough to earn them the title of "Raw" Death: just one listen is enough to understand how well this definition fits the band in question, one of the leading exponents of the genre capable of expressing the purest and most minimal side of this genre much more than other so-called Raw Death groups (I refer to the various Entombed and Dismember), in truth very much influenced by other genres (in the case of the two aforementioned, Hard Rock and Black metal).

The music of Autopsy is raw and unadorned, deliberately unrefined and approximate; within their album, nothing is remarkable or polished, it's all thrown together in a slapdash manner, very much Raw indeed. The technical level of these guys borders on zero: Reifert, both behind the drums and on vocals, seems to set aside his meager drumming skills he had shown in his previous band to focus on the singing, which truth be told is not exceptional either. However, while the vocal performance is acceptable, the drumming reveals serious inaccuracies and, above all, a nauseating simplicity (at least in a genre like this): alongside rhythms already heard for years in every metal record, in fact, there are very few interesting ideas, mostly consisting of suffocating slowdowns.
The work of the guitarists is likewise unexciting, confused, and lacking in noteworthy passages: the parts consist of riffs drawn from the most uncompromising Thrash repertoire and the early sounds of Death and Grind. The bassist might as well not be a member of the band since, except for a few passages, you can't even hear them: nor is it due to a lousy production, which makes the sounds muddled and confused, leaving one instrument indistinguishable from another (and as if that weren't enough, it's also quite "empty").

The songs travel at a steady but not very fast pace and often linger on cemetery slowdowns: their structure is not complex and certainly aims more at impact than artistic value. That said, you will have an idea of what "Acts Of The Unspeakable" is, a CD absolutely left to its fate, where there are four guys playing without even knowing why they are doing it: a reflection of this is the lyrics, focused on Gore themes but not excessively complicated.
Autopsy gleefully don't care about releasing an album that's poor in ideas and has two significant songs ("Skullptures" and "Funeraeality"), indeed, they make this their flag. Seen in this light, each of the elements I previously criticized, takes on the shape of a piece that occupies a precise place: everything functions as part of a decadent and decayed proposal, made up of ugly and murky songs, embittered by a sense of abandonment and drift that make them the perfect soundtrack for a summer afternoon spent on a bench drinking beer.

The mood is neither suffocating nor gloomy (with a few exceptions), it is simply rough and stagnant, a sound that neither adds nor removes anything from the listener. With this 1992 album (even more than with the subsequent "Shitfun"), Autopsy consecrated themselves as the most genuinely rotten side of Death metal, giving the public an album as useless as it is fundamental: this is the raw Death in its most (im)pure essence, a genre with very little emotional and musical value but one that all genre lovers must hear at least once in their lives.