Autopsy - Fiend For Blood
Review: Autopsy baffle their audience with an aesthetic that is a small part conventional death metal and mostly technique for maintaining an atmosphere of gore obsession - sloppy, grotesque chords, passages of infinitessimal weight, odd almost-melodic bits, with lead guitar that comments internally enough to avoid being a fretrun of scale patterns. The rhythms are stages of decay, collapsing on themselves, and chording where not dissonant is omnipresent power chords staggering into one another in battlefield exhaustion.
Chris Reifert, of Death's Scream Bloody Gore fame, plays drums with instrumental prowess and creativity, keeping pace like a lurking gangster before popping out with a few choice shots and retiring in the complexity of fill. Percussion is understated but emphatic and gives rise through technique to a gesture of simplicity on the edge of complexity through boundary constraints. Vocals batter against drums and guitar to articulate a slim channel of pace of sound arrival.
Grotesque in its beauties and profound in its inevitable continuity, this release blended doom metal and conceptual elements into gore-bound Tampa metal to make a new style. Fast tempo breaks, odd shifting rhythms, and thoroughly crepitative guitar sound make Autopsy the founder and principle practicioner of gore metal, as their work is most commonly called. While its origins and appearance are deliberately repugnant, the music within remains potent, thoughtful symbolism of a dying empire.