There’s a great seam of brutal death metal bands about at the moment. Bands who are taking the OSDM sound and putting it through a grinder to remove any semblance of melody and structure, then putting through another mangle to make it as dirty as fuck. Sanguissagobogg may be at the vanguard of this, but Stabbing are surely not far behind with this rather grimy and dirty album Eon Of Obscenity.
Stabbing are different in that in a male-dominated genre, they are fronted by Bridget Lynch, a woman who has probably one of the best death growls you will have heard. Low toned and able to move your bowels at times, particularly when she goes for the deep resonant growl (listen to ‘Symphony Of Absurdity’ for one of the deeper ones), she provides the perfect counterbalance to the carnival of torturous noise that the rest of the music makes. It’s a clattering, unnerving blast of noise, finely tuned to just the right pace so as not to turn into simple noise. It’s balanced tone and speed against a dirty production makes the short thirty minutes seem longer than it actually is as they pull you into their bowels of hell.
If its track title you want then they don’t hold back here either with ‘Sonoluminescent Hemoglobinopathy’ being the pick of the bunch. A track such as ‘Nauseating Composition’ (featuring Ricky Myers from Suffocation) is a literal description of not just the song, but the album as a whole. Death metal has always prided itself on its gruesome outlook and horror lyrics, often veering into misogynistic undertones unfortunately. Here it all gets subverted whilst still retaining that pure sound of horror that you want from this kind of music. It’s music that sounds like you are a fly on the wall in some grimy video nasty, yet there is also something much deeper at work here too. You feel that deep within all the horror and mechanistic sounds is a deeper meaning on existence and life today.
With this new album, Stabbing set themselves up as the new upstarts of brutal death metal, and is an essential listen for those of you who have had any interest in it before.
