When the first Mortal Wound album opens, you wouldn’t think the guys behind this grinding, blistering display of old school Death Metal would hail from sunny Los Angeles. This is music that feels like it’s been scraped from the floor of a slaughterhouse in Texas, guts and blood and scrapple. The Anus of the World is stringy and greasy, like a chunk of gristly fat stuck between your teeth that you can’t pick free, that you taste for hours to come.
Opener “Found Dead in a Bush” gets you into the action right away. The template for the entire experience is laid out before you. Weird audio sample, blistering Death Metal featuring buzzing crunching guitars, relentless drumming, bass somewhere in that mix holding the bottom down, and vocals so guttural you’d think you’re listening to a Mortician album. And this is how the entire record plays out: like you’re captured by a deranged serial killer, he has you tied to a chair facing a television, and he’s flipping through the channels like a maniac, giving you snippets of different programs between his insane berating. You’re trapped, surrounded by horror dripping gore, but man, the insanity of it is so insanely good, you don’t mind it so much.
And so it goes. Mortal Wound offering one gore masterpiece after another, interspersed with audio samples to set the mood. “Tunnel Rat” is claustrophobic, maddening riffs that threaten to bury you alive. “Drug Filled Cadaver” spins round and round, dizzying, until you feel like puking. “Born Again Hard” for some reason reminds me of a Death Metal Pantera, which is a good thing, and lets me emphasize that all of these songs, despite their grim and relentless nature, seethe and pulse with an inner groove that is really quite pleasing. “Engulfed in Liquid Hellfire” is a slow crawl through a burning hell, as the title of the song implies. This one is a grinder. “Spirit of the Bayonet” starts slow, stays mostly slow, but does that colossal thing where it turns from sludge into a massive monster, a kaiju ponderously smashing through a hapless city. Closing track “Royally Fucked Forever” is a surprise piece of sunny delight. No, not really. It kind of sums up what came before; grim, haunting, a deluge of blood-soaked riffs to usher you out the door.
The Anus of the World isn’t the kind of album that’s going to uplift you. It’s here to pummel you and pummel it does. Four of the eleven listed tracks are audio samples, which would be a bummer if the actual songs themselves weren’t so goddamned good. This is thick and meaty stuff, all of the songs running the gamut from about four minutes to about six minutes in length. The samples add some sprinkles of atmosphere to the whole affair, and they work wonderfully. In the end, you’re getting some really good Death Metal, and fans of the older school will definitely enjoy this. They don’t do anything new here, but really, they don’t have to. This is quality stuff, bloody and raw and nasty.
