Pungent Stench
For God Your Soul... For Me Your Flesh

THE REVIEW

Today I wandered again through my endless and silent mountains; and on the return home, after a real slog of a few hours immersed in an unusual warmth for the season, I met Alessio intent on reading a book in the hamlet of Anzuno. As always happens when we meet, we talk about music, concerts we've seen, new purchases: it's been like this for decades, since we first met. And today, my friend was wearing a T-shirt with the cover of the first Pungent Stench album reproduced on it; hence the reason for my reckless reviewing operation today.

The band is debuting on long play after an EP and a couple of split-albums already perfectly on target. It's 1990, and Death Metal is starting to take shape: it's the year of Entombed's debut, Death's "Spiritual Healing", Obituary's "Cause of Death", etc., etc.

Pungent Stench hails from the learned and cultured Vienna; but they have nothing of that. They are crude blacksmiths who have made auditory wickedness their belligerent cry of liberation. A disgusting album right from the irreverent cover and the title chosen for the album; no concession, however minimal, of melody. No kind of technicality; a degenerate mix that has as musical reference the compactness and compressed sound of the aforementioned Obituary, the primordial speed of Terrorizer, with lyrics so splatter and sick that they make Carcass seem like innocent schoolboys.

They tell us about necrophilia, cannibalism, human deformities; and it is reasonable to expect these disgusting lyrics in tracks like "Just Let Me Rot", "Embalmed in Sulphuric Acid", "Blood, Pus and Gastric Juice". To the very few who might be interested, I advise translating these putrescent poems!!

An unruly, rough work, with a bass sound so distorted and present it hurts; the whole album unfolds in the same gloomy and insane way. With the climax reached in the seven minutes of the title track: slow and asphyxiating in the first seconds, with sudden accelerations supported by the grunts of singer and guitarist Martin Schirenc. Abominable minutes that lie exactly halfway between the primitive Grindcore of Repulsion and the more canonical Death Metal of the bands I mentioned at the beginning.

They managed to push beyond in morbidity in the subsequent two albums that I will not fail to tell you about; for now, I'll stop here with the "radiant and sunny" Pungent Stench...EXTREME DEFORMITY...

P.S. For my excursion today, I sported a wonderful T-shirt of Mike Patton, Dave Lombardo, King Buzzo's Fantomas. An album by this supergroup is titled "Suspended Animation," which is also, incredibly coincidentally, a track from the Pungent Stench album. Not an entirely casual encounter, then, that of today!!!

Ad Maiora.