Pathology – Pathology (Review)

Pathology are a US death metal band and this is their ninth album.

Lamentation opens the album and immediately sets the tone for the next 32 minutes. This is hideously sickening brutal death metal, the type you’ll either love or hate.

Guttural, ultra-brutal, slamming death metal has rarely sounded as atavistic or as uncompromising as this.

Using both faster sections and slower chug-fests, these tracks are at their most effective when they’re wielding fiercely heavy riffs the size of mountains and crushing everything around them with huge slamming guitars. That’s not to say that the faster parts aren’t also destructively effective, of course.

The vocals are insanely deep and performed in the manner of a hundred ghouls all belching at the same time. Constantly, without letup. An exaggeration, maybe, but the vocals are probably the sickest thing about this release. In case I haven’t been clear – this is a brutally wonderful thing.

I make no apologies for my shameless enjoyment of this album. How on earth can you dislike anything as brutally single-minded as this is? All this album wants to do is crush and kill you. That’s all. It has the tools to do this, and the louder you play the album the more primitive and more effective those tools become.

I very much doubt this will convert many to the church of brutal death metal. As I said earlier, you’ll either love or hate this. Most people will be in the latter camp, I feel. Me? I’m firmly in the former.

Now, if you need me, I’ll be bouncing around like a lunatic to Pathology’s latest, in this special padded room I’ve recently found myself in a lot of the time…