Mammoth Grinder

COSMIC CRYPT

RELAPSE POWER TRIP PUGILIST DIVES INTO DEATH METAL’S CESSPOOL Not content with sloshing around in critical froth as drummer with thrash renegades Power Trip, Chris Ulsh has restarted Mammoth Grinder to remind everybody what proper, red-blooded, Neanderthal death metal sounds like. The band’s first album in nearly five years, Cosmic Crypt feels like one single, sustained rush of barbarous sludge: the squalid grotesqueries of Autopsy given a sideways upgrade and double-dipped in Lovecraftian turmoil. Songs like Human Is Obsolete veer from snail’s-pace dismay to a raging, punked-up clatter, as if 30 years of evolution in death metal have been entirely ignored and Death’s Zombie Ritual still remains the ultimate benchmark. Which, in a very real sense, it probably is. Meanwhile, the vicious Locusts Nest could easily be mistaken for a Ribspreader out-take, were it not so utterly filthy in sonic tone and gloriously slack-jawed in execution.

FOR FANS OF: AUTOPSY, THE LURKING FEAR, RIBSPREADER

DOM LAWSON