Album Review : Festerdecay - Reality Rotten to the Core (2023)
Goregrind is 90% shitposting. Don't get me wrong, I like the genre. But it's so extreme that it often doesn't require a lot of effort or creativity. You could very well come up with thirty disgusting medico-legal song titles and repeat them in a microphone to a one or two guitar riffs and a drum machine programmed to play blast beats in a single day. All you’d need is to lower the pitch of your microphone to make your voice sound like toilet gurgles. But there are goregrind bands that make an effort to write coherent songs.
A band like Japan’s Festerdecay pleasantly stands out from the sickening primordial chaos of goregrind music with a throwback to old school Carcass-like Reality Rotten to the Core.
Reality Rotten to the Core has 14 songs that range from 1:06 to 3:53, for a total of a whopping thirty minutes of goregrind. That is a quite respectable length for a goregrind record. The opener Rotten Fester Decay sets the tone for what you're about to hear. I'm not sure there are any lyrics to speak of. It's mostly guitarist Haru Nomiyama hammering killer riff over killer riff to an occasional gurgle. Unlike many guitarists in the genre, he lets his riffs breathe and create the atmosphere that is critical to Festerdecay's sound.
Hash the Tongue has a more traditional goregrind approach, with occasional groovy guitar riffs to change the pace. The last part of the song could be used for a WWE heel walkout. Fall in Grind features this thick, filthy bass and even groovier guitar riffs. It even has the mutant goregrind cousin of a breakdown at the end because Japanese people do not care about silly, arbitrary genre rules. This blatant disrespect for unwritten rules of a genre that is mostly shitposting is what makes Festerdecay so much fun.
Disintegration of Organs is one of my favorite songs on the record. Built on a mid-tempo guitar riff, it moves slow like a fucking mutant predator chasing you down in one of your nightmares. The best part is that he eventually catches up to you and the song appropriately morphs into a more common goregrind song then. Awesomely enough, it also features undistorted spoken word. Aborticide is super violent, chaotic and in your face. Not crazy about the baby-killing stuff, but the song is appropriately intense.
Because Festerdecay seem to have an internal rule against making two songs that sound similar, Stench of Decay (the second longest song on the record) features several singing style by their frontman KK2, including some undistorted growls. It’s fast, then super slow, the fast again. It’s followed by Psychopharmacist, the shortest song on Reality Rotten to the Core. An absolute onslaught of brutal grind for twenty seconds that falls apart (I literally thought the song had ended at first) and builds back up into a ghastly instrumental.
By now, I’m sure you’ve noticed this is a very fun and unpredictable record that explores all the musical and atmospheric nuances of goregrind. From the Dark Tomb features a sample of a Japanese woman speaking backwards that transitions into the wettest fucking gurgle you've ever heard. It’s another one of these monster themed songs reminiscent of old school goregrind and brutal death metal like Mortician and Impetigo, adding another layer to this already ridiculously nuanced album.
I guess I didn't know goregrind could be nuanced until now.
Exposing the Skin Tissue has tremolo picking riffs and harsh, hardcore punk like vocal deliveries. Carcasses’ Revenge has dual guitar tones. Cryptic Wounds packs an absurd amount of riffs in a minute an a half. There's a sense of fun and boundlessness that emanates from this record. According to Metal Archives, some of these guys are in these twenties and Reality Rotten to the Core feels like four young dudes just trying to push the boundaries of what they do and where they want to go. It's cathartic as fuck.
Reality Rotten to the Core ends with Liquidized Gallbladder, Scum’s Karma and Reconstruction of Malignant Miasma, once again three very different songs. The last two are among my favorites on the record. Scum’s Karma has more of a traditional grindcore song structure, while Reconstruction is a celebration of everythng about this record that's weird and quirky. It’s groovy, it features hardcore punk vocals and weirdo rasps and devolves into a strange. mid-tempo mess. It’s great!
*
This is a solid goregrind record. Perhaps not quite on the level of Last Days of Humanity’s latest, but it's better than many LDOH albums. Reality Rotten to the Core brims with an energy and creativity that is too often absent from goregrind records. It feels a little bit shambolic and unfocused at times, which is somewhat normal for goregrind, but I do think Festerdecay has flashed the potential to write better structured and more coherent songs. They have what it takes to be legends, but they’re not quite there.
