Catasexual Urge Motivation
The Encyclopedia of Serial Murders
[Razorback]


Shit, this is some sick shit. Not only is it sick, it is also from Japan, which might explain it, since it is well known that the Japanese are masters when it comes to sick shit. The atrocities they committed during W.W.II is a fine example of their credibility in this area. Or nowadays for example just compare the regular, mainstream Japanese television game-shows to their Western counterparts and see the difference, then think about the kind of underground shit they may be pulling off (anyone remembers the Guinea Pig series?). Wasn't sex with minors under certain circumstances, not to mention child pornography legal in Japan until recently? Anyhow, the point I am trying to make is that this is sick and brutal, and even sort of original too, if you can say that about a grindcore album nowadays.

Imagine early Carcass running into Mortician in some godforsaken morgue on the edge of town where corpses of deceased bums, overdosed junkies, burned-out whores and murdered drug dealers are dumped and then experimented on. That's where both bands decide to collaborate on a soundtrack for the most extreme snuff movie that was never made.

C.U.M., however, choose to do that old grindcore thing on their own terms. Their punishing, low-end rumble punctuated by a drum machine and inhuman growls and belches quickly forces itself under your skin, and it will surely take you a while to scratch it out. The riffs are heavily distorted and disgorged in vomit-like fashion, yet work surprisingly well. It sounds terribly messy at first but ends up sticking to you like a deadly flesh-eating bacteria, which only shows that the band paid much more attention to the song structures than might seem at first. And there is something about the way these guys use their drum machine. The bouncing rhythms they come up with have an almost dance-like quality, which not only lends an additional punch to the music, but also gives it a bit of an industrial edge, thus tilting it away from the regular grindcore territory into the more left field direction. Plus, the band's obsession with all things related to murder is something else. Neither Mortician with their campy horror movies infatuation, nor Carcass with their gleeful autopsy accounts can completely measure up to this. Well, Carcass could, except that they were doing it with a sense of humor underneath all the gore, not to mention their then-vegetarian rhetoric. C.U.M., on the other hand, seem to take their chosen subject matter pretty seriously. The lyrics are not included, but the humorless, macabre song titles speak vividly for themselves: "Mutilation, Rape and Serial Murder As Modern Metaphor," "Murder is Better than Birth," "I Am As Beautiful As I Have Killed," "Mass Murder, the Only Way to Become God," "I'll Confess Everything That I Have Ever Killed 5 People and One Was a Little Girl." None of them, though, can compete with the following and probably everyone's favorite title: "He Shot Her Down and Ate Her Flesh, and Then He Said "Excuse Me for Living, but I Preferred to Be Eaten Rather Than to Eat."" Yeah, go figure, but such grammatical incongruities only add more appeal to the whole thing.

The CD's running time is more than generous, so it will be a challenge trying to stomach the whole 60 minutes of this madness (which also include the cover of Impetigo's "Defiling the Grave"), but it's worth it. It's too bad that C.U.M. don't exist anymore. Well, not in this form anyway, as they have changed their name to Vampiric Motives, but, thanks to the nice folks at Razorback, at least we have this re-issue to feast on. All the killers out there need to listen to this for inspiration before going on a rampage.


© 2001 boris