Powerfully disgusting material. It should be. 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. 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.
Peaceville 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. Musically and artistically this is the peak for Autopsy, who here evolve their gore metal style into a grindcore-influenced experiment that builds songs like bizarre variants on old metal tunes, normal music sent through the tonal grinder and made into churning plunging trudging stuff that speaks its piece through composite riffs and intense patterning in these slow songs of degradation and breakdown. The entropic crusade presented here is to provide the shock of life and the fear of death and to present as artistic experience the obsession with the morbid in a simply prurient but scientific way.