Carcass
Surgical Remission / Surplus Steel EP

No, no, we're not there.

I have little to nothing to save from this EP by Carcass, released a year after "Surgical Steel," their comeback album after 17 years; a work that already didn't convince me but barely managed to pass.

With this EP instead, we are at a thumbs down, at mortal boredom during listening; fortunately, it only lasts a handful of minutes.

Let's start with the few positive notes: first of all the cover, which highlights instruments used for autopsies; and Jeff Walker's voice, which is always a filthy, excoriated, and foul howl. And here I stop with the acceptable things.

For the rest, we are faced with tracks lacking that fierce "ankle-biting," that barbaric and impetuous flow of notes that has always been a trademark of the Liverpool band.

A flat, spotless production that cries out for revenge from those listeners who have grown up ruining their hearing with the first three heavy albums by the English band. Four songs, plus a final outro, without a scrap of "offensive" content, those recorded for this EP; a little assignment carried out with no effort, with sounds already heard, and much better, in past decades.

The disappointment is total for me, who morbidly loved Carcass when their sick tracks told of putrefactions, diseases, butchers at work, blood, human innards, bodies torn apart and made into pieces.

The blame in my opinion is again to be found in the German label Nuclear Blast that produced the work, seeking more accessible sounds for a broader audience, for higher sales, for greater earnings; but may these Germans go get blessed once and for all!!

Moving on to the tracks, I only save the last minute and a half of "Intensive Battery Brooding": finally a decisive change of pace for a song that until that moment induces drowsiness (it's incredible to write yet it's really like this...). And then suddenly Carcass reminds, first and foremost themselves, of being a band that wrote Grindcore and Death Metal history, launching into a deadly and terrifying gallop where the instruments become vicious protagonists, creating an unheard, immense, damned sonic magma...But it's too little dammit...

Diabolos Rising 666.