Carcass
Surgical Steel

Brief introduction perhaps aimed at giving logic to my argument: I have always been very negatively attracted to the reunions of bands after many years. There is no exact reason. That's just how I am! And this rule is confirmed by "Surgical Steel", an album released by the English band in 2013, a good seventeen years after the previous "Swansong".

On the musical and historical importance of Carcass in the Metal scene, I think it's completely pointless to dwell; there are pages and pages online that well recount the life and works of this band, fundamental in the birth and spread of Death Metal.

All the positive premises were present at the time of purchasing the album: the title of the work and the individual songs, the cover, the lyrics of the tracks, all in the best and depraved tradition of the band. Surgical instruments used for autopsies arranged in a neat and circular manner have a great presence on the front of the cover itself, where the band's name and album title are missing. For a lover like me of Carcass, it was very simple to associate it all with them, given the immediate reference that can be derived from their previous masterpieces like "Heartwork" and "Necroticism-Descanting The Insalubrious". Production and mixing were entrusted to Colin Richardson and Andy Sneap, also not needing any presentation given their decades-long careers in countless extreme bands; and so far so good, but unfortunately not for long.

The album is released by the Teutonic "Nuclear Blast" and not their historic label "Earache"; all this makes me wrinkle my nose, mouth, and ears. And indeed the album, meticulously crafted in terms of sound, seems to me all too clean, almost cold, lacking that roughness and rot that was a constant especially of the early seminal albums. Two historic members are also missing: Ken Owen on drums, struck in 1999 by a massive cerebral hemorrhage and now unable to play, and guitarist Michael Amott, engaged in one of his innumerable music projects. The substitutes are nevertheless excellent musicians, but in my opinion, they cannot compete, even in terms of image, with their predecessors.

To be honest, the album's opening, after a brief instrumental intro, is entrusted to two tracks that are authentic slabs of unprecedented heaviness: the short-timed "Thrasher's Abattoir" and the devastated "Cadaver Pouch Conveyor System", where the melodic Death component rises strongly, thanks to the surgical guitar work of that phenomenon named Bill Steer; with the added torn and raw voice of Jeff Walker, who has not lost a gram of his "ferocious beauty".

Then the spell and also the surprise of the first tracks break and the album continues in too obvious a manner: and it's not a good thing. The Heavy-Death riffs are all there, the usual Carcass accelerations remain a fundamental component in almost all the songs, with some more cadenced and Hard passages that recall their glorious past. But everything seems to me executed in a way that's too controlled, without that executive brutality that I remember well; of course, the years pass and the past youthful violence remains a distant memory. For me, the classic little task done without infamy and without praise, played by serious professionals who did not want to take any risks: in two words a very predictable and useless album. This is my opinion, obviously very debatable.

The penultimate track somehow represents a novelty, with its interminable Hard-epic progression over eight minutes long: "Mount Of Execution". A song that opens with a disconcerting and totally unexpected acoustic arpeggio, then continues delving into deep, majestic, almost progressive territories. But that's not enough to elevate the album to a masterpiece, perhaps not even expected after all these years; that's why my final judgment cannot go beyond three stars. And I'm sorry about that.

One thing I have left to do: listen again at a destabilizing volume to what I consider their best album and one of the absolute peaks of all Death Metal. "Necroticism...etc...etc..." recalling with utmost joy when I saw the English band in January 1994 in Milan. An experience I still remember as so intense as it was!!!

Dedicated to my friend "The Decline"... you know why...

Ad Maiora.