Introduction

SYMPHONIES OF SICKNESS (1989)
1) Reek Of Putrefaction; 2) Exhume To Consume; 3) Excoriating Abdominal Emanation; 4) Ruptured In Purulence; 5) Empathological Necroticism; 6) Embryonic Necropsy And Devourment; 7) Swarming Vulgar Mass Of Infected Virulency; 8) Cadaveric Incubator Of Endoparasites; 9) Slash Dementia; 10) Crepitating Bowel Erosion.
Already they are beginning to evolve. Arguably the best thing about Carcass is that, while the basic ideology of the band remains consistent throughout their career, (almost) no two albums by them sound the same — unlike so many of their metal peers, these guys could apparently get bored with formula real easy, and found it more fun to keep on experimenting with various ways they could get their Coroner's Message through to us.
Here, we have the songs putting on some fat, sometimes expanding to gigantic, five-minute run­ning time periods, and, more importantly, a huge quantum leap in production values, so you can occasionally distinguish rhythm from lead guitar, and — oh horrors! — ever so often, even dis­cern a necrolyrical bit or two. And while this makes the experience somewhat less extreme and grotesque (a danger in itself, because the only way to take Carcass seriously is to lack the bare means to take them seriously), you actually get to appreciate their skills a bit more. There are passages here that are individually memorable — for instance, the slow, riff-based introduction to ʽRuptured In Purulenceʼ, one minute of intense thrash brutality with clever alternation of conti­nuous and «ruptured» (sorry) melody. Eventually, they pick up speed and launch into the usual messy pandemonium, but the introduction has already managed to plant a seed of respectability.
Or, if you take the opening number ʽReek Of Putrefactionʼ (add this to our ever-growing col­lection of song titles that did not appear on the album with the same title), you will find it intro­duced by a spooky guitar intro that borrows the Tony Iommi vibe, especially in that little vibrato bit that seems directly copped from ʽBlack Sabbathʼ. Later on, the riff reappears doubled with a high-pitched doom-laden lead guitar part — well worth waiting for as your ears are treated to the usual slash-and-burn speed gallop in the interim. And although not all the tracks feature these melodic elements, and none of the tracks are «melodic» through and through, we are still clearly dealing with a desire to add a little bit more individuality and expressivity to the tracks. You'd think that ʽEmpathological Necroticismʼ and ʽEmbryonic Necropsyʼ should sound completely the same, but they don't. Well, not quite completely.
That said, Symphonies Of Sickness is clearly a transitional album, and that's a risky state of affairs where, if the stars were lucky, you could satisfy everybody — or, if they weren't, nobody. The melodic bits really sound more like «teasers», sometimes entertaining you for very short bits as elementary separators of the sludgy verses; and the increased song length only rarely works for the better, because they aren't really expanding them into Metallica-style multi-part thrash an­thems or anything like that, and there is still no way that they can make the speed-based grooves too distinct from each other. Eventually, even though the record is only slightly longer than its predecessor, it wears me out a bit faster, and the last three or four songs become just a tedious blur. But I can also see where hardcore fans of extreme metal would call this their favorite — because it does completely retain the insane-grotesque-evil aura, while seriously improving on the production; already the next record could be judged as a serious betrayal of faith by some of these people. In short, this is their «cleanest dirtiest» album, if you need a really brief summary.
NECROTICISM - DESCANTING THE INSALUBRIOUS (1991)
1) Inpropagation; 2) Corporal Jigsaw Quandary; 3) Symposium Of Sickness; 4) Pedigree Butchery; 5) Incarnated Solvent Abuse; 6) Carneous Cacoffiny; 7) Lavaging Expectorate Of Lysergide Composition; 8) Forensic Clinicism / The Sanguine Article; 9*) Tools Of The Trade; 10*) Pyosified (Still Rotten To The Gore); 11*) Hepatic Tissue Fermentation II.
This is where they finally realized that a proper metal band has to have two guitar­ists in order to achieve real respectability — and at least one should preferably be of Scandinavian origin, cuz there's nothing like a shot of thick Viking blood to add that authentic berserk component to your metal riffage. Thus, enter Michael Amott, a natural choice since his own recently formed Swedish band was called Carnage, and was essentially the Swedish equivalent of Carcass. The result was obvious — a more «melodic» (so to say) form of the music, with a separate lead player capable of adding colorful flourishes to the brutal riffs and dutifully churning out speedy-flashy classical-influenced solos where deemed necessary. Now the band was finally set up to produce their equivalent of Slayer's Reign In Blood, if it really wanted to.
Indeed, the record is far more ambitious. The songs are lightly adorned with special effects (in­cluding occasional voiceovers that are probably sampled from obscure B-movies, or an occasio­nal atmospheric synthesizer backdrop, or even a tiny bit of acoustic guitar now and then), the song structures become even more complex and now regularly alternate between Sabbathy slow and ultra-fast, and then there's all that lead guitar. If not for the lyrics, this would have been just a regular speed-thrash-whatever-mash-up — the lyrics, however, stubbornly persist in this grotes­que fascination with the morgue, as the album is formally organized around the concept of fin­ding various ways of dispensing with corpses (both out of practical necessity and as a hobby).
The problem is that it is completely impossible to seriously praise the record in «layman» terms. The musical structures of these tunes, some of which now run for as long as six or seven minutes, clearly seem «progressive» — the band is now approaching their music as actual music, rather than mere noisy backdrop for staged offensiveness, and all the compositions work as composi­tions; in fact, sometimes I think I'd much rather listen to the instrumental versions without having to divert attention towards the growling vocals that really sound the same all the way through, not just in style and timbre, but even in simple phrasing. Compared to the vocals, the instrumental work is far more demanding — the riffs are more complex than Metallica's and the shifts between multiple sections are flawlessly executed. But the riffs also do not lend themselves easily to «visu­alization» — for the life of me I couldn't even begin to explain in what way the emotional impact of ʽPedigree Butcheryʼ differs from that of ʽCarneous Cacoffinyʼ.
At the same time, we should also keep in mind that Carcass were far from the only metal band experimenting with the limits of the genre — and if they did not have that particular anatomical-pathological schtick of theirs, chances are serious that Necroticism would have been completely lost in the sea of high-profile, technically accomplished metal releases from around the year 1991. So perhaps the best news here is that the original «spirit of Carcass», despite all the increased complexity, is still loyally preserved, and that it adds the necessary shade of theatrical gore to the music. No, scratch «gore» — it adds the necessary shade of macabre fun to the music, which is the perfect aural equivalent of indulging in your dark side when splattering your opponent's brains (or other parts) against the wall in a fighting video game. Of course, it goes without saying that, in the light of this, Necroticism should only be recommended for people with good mental health — so, if you happen to have Charlie Manson in your family history, please disregard this thumbs up and submit yourself to preventive therapy in the form of my Avril Lavigne reviews or something like that.
HEARTWORK (1993)
1) Buried Dreams; 2) Carnal Forge; 3) No Love Lost; 4) Heartwork; 5) Embodiment; 6) This Mortal Coil; 7) Arbeit Macht Fleisch; 8) Blind Bleeding The Blind; 9) Doctrinal Expletives; 10) Death Certificate.
This is where opinions begin to split, skulls commence to crack, and symposia of sickness start degenerating into pedigree butchery. For some people, Heartwork is the absolute pinnacle of the shivery art of Carcass; for others, it is an unforgivable betrayal of the primary values for which this band had so affirmatively stood up in the past. What's up with the sissy title? What's up with the symbolic, but generally inoffensive album cover? What's up with Carcass songs called ʽNo Love Lostʼ and ʽThis Mortal Coilʼ, titles more suitable for Celine Dion and, uh... This Mortal Coil? What's up with the lyrics being almost free of new anatomical terminology? What's up with the clean, almost sterile production? Where have all the gory times gone?
Of course, you cannot blame an artist for wanting to break out of a stereotype — and, let's face it, by 1993 the band's «gore-grind» schtick was getting old, not to mention that it had been success­fully picked up by quite a few newcomers, like Cannibal Corpse, whose primary point was to outgross the old masters, whatever it takes. Reasonably, Steer and Ammott must have decided that they had no real interest in competing with others in the grossness department, and that they would try something different — namely, to «clean up» their act a bit and go for a synthesis of grindcore brutality and melodic heavy metal, where the individual songs would have more indi­viduality while still being conjoined by a general atmosphere of viciousness.
Thus, only a couple of tunes here truly remind of the Carcass of old (ʽCarnal Forgeʼ is the best «retro» example), while the rest are strictly in the «melodic death metal» vein, with distinct, often seriously slow riffs from Steer and the usual classically-influenced leads from Amott. The vocals remain in incomprehensible growl mode throughout, which is a minus — I think that stuff like ʽNo Love Lostʼ calls for cleaner singing, but perhaps they were too afraid to bring in clean vocals, thinking that it would make them sound like Queensryche or something. Also, in terms of instru­mentation and arrangements, the album is surprisingly less diverse than Necroticism: there's no special effects, no sampled overdubs, no acoustic interludes, absolutely nothing to draw your attention away from the basic riff — solo — riff — solo patterns.
Although the vocals go so far in the mainstream direction as to sometimes arrange themselves in verse/chorus patterns, it is pretty hard to apply the term «catchy» to any vocal «melody» that sounds as if it were delivered by Satan suffering from acute constipation. However, the riffs are fairly strong and could easily withstand competition with any sophisticated classic thrash or death metal band — ʽNo Love Lostʼ, ʽEmbodimentʼ, the stop-and-start tricks on ʽDoctrinal Expletivesʼ all qualify, and these are only the slower ones; the faster ones, like ʽBlind Bleeding The Blindʼ, add breathtaking excitement without abandoning the melodic angle. From a technical standpoint at least, the general quality of the tunes — complexity of chord patterns, smoothness of transition from fast to slow sections and back again, thoughtful construction of lead parts — leaves little to be desired.
That said, it would be useless to deny a certain amount of disappointment: now that Carcass are no longer really an «extreme» band, they do fairly little to make the music stand out from the rest of the competition. This is just normal, high-quality melodic death metal with faint echoes of the band's original grotesque identity; in fact, we could probably go as far as to state that this was the beginning of the end — particularly with Amott quitting soon after the album's release to form Arch Enemy. The fact that the band retains its penchant for morbid song title puns like ʽArbeit Macht Fleischʼ (good name for a B movie about zombie-infestated concentration camps) and ʽBlind Bleeding The Blindʼ does little to conceal the fact that they are attempting to get serious, and maybe the last thing this world needs is Carcass being serious. Still, as long as the riffage is that good (although I couldn't even begin to describe the particular ways in which it is good without turning into a certified metalhead), and as long as they sound so excited about finding new ways to upgrade their image, thumbs up are in order.
SWANSONG (1995)
1) Keep On Rotting In The Free World; 2) Tomorrow Belongs To Nobody; 3) Black Star; 4) Cross My Heart; 5) Childs Play; 6) Room 101; 7) Polarized; 8) Generation Hexed; 9) Firm Hand; 10) R**k The Vote; 11) Don't Believe A Word; 12) Go To Hell.
Well, I totally agree with the fans that Swansong'>Swansong can hardly even begin to be considered a proper Carcass album. Where are the insane tempos? Where's the guitar/bass/drum madness? Where are the gory lyrics? Pretty much the only thing that somehow ties this record to everything that was before are the growling vocals, and even these are constantly in danger of becoming comprehen­sible — this is arguably the first Carcass album where you can generally make out what the songs are about, and many of them are about... social protest and disillusionment... oh wait... are these guys turning into Bad Religion or what???
Not surprisingly, the album often gets negative marks from metalhead fans and critics alike, be­cause, well, those who want their Bad Religion can have it, and those who want their kick-ass melodic heavy metal à la Accept can have it, but this is like a total frickin' sellout — and, in fact, it was almost going to be official, since after the success of Heartwork Carcass, with new guitar player Carlo Regadas replacing Michael Amott (who went off to start Arch Enemy), were all set to go big, signing up with Columbia. Eventually, much to the relief of the indie metal crowd, the deal fell through, and they returned to Earache records; but in the meantime, the band members managed to spoil their mutual relationship, Bill Steer kind of got bored with the whole metal business, and by the time they mopped up the sessions, the group was pretty much finished.
That said, if you look at the general evolution of Carcass music, Swansong seems like a perfectly logical conclusion. Arguable as it is, I'd still say that it contains their most «naturally-sounding» and memorable set of tunes, even if it comes at the expense of downplaying the shock factor al­most to zero level and dropping the search for innovative production techniques and melodic layerings. A single example may suffice — the main riff of ʽBlack Starʼ, sounding like a nasty shrapnel run from a low-cruisin' airplane, seems far more evocative to me than anything on Heartwork, let alone all those earlier and messier tunes. It may be a minus, yes, that the track quickly begins to sound like a solid, but derivative imitation of Iron Maiden; but this will only lead us into the uncomfortable depths of discussing what matters more — quality/memorability or innovation/individuality — and I'd like to avoid that discussion in a set of Carcass reviews.
Anyway, at least they do not lose their sense of punny humor (ʽKeep On Rotting In The Free Worldʼ, ʽGeneration Hexedʼ), and at least these good riffs and melodic solos keep coming, even if I could totally see ʽGeneration Hexedʼ sung cleanly by Accept's Udo Dirkschneider and its riffs cracked out by Wolf Hoffmann — and most other songs are like a mish-mash of various metal substyles, from Metallica-Megadeth thrash to the British New Wave (the band themselves men­tioned Thin Lizzy as one of the influences at the time, although this is certainly not the first asso­ciation that is going to jump into your head). Actually, at this point the growling vocals in general are an unfortunate atavistic compromise — songs like ʽRoom 101ʼ, with its mad prophet tale, were made to be sung cleanly: I close my eyes and try to imagine what would Ronnie James Dio have done with it, and once I do, the actual version begins to sound like a death metal parody of an unpreserved Dio track.
In fact, with a cleaner approach, Swansong would have made for a very impressive collection of «protest-metal» tunes — the melodies of songs like ʽTomorrow Belongs To Nobodyʼ have enough thunder and snap to them to sound convincing, and I cannot for the life of me regard Steer's and Walker's songwriting here as throwaway songwriting (well, apparently while they were writing the tunes and making the original recordings, nobody thought as of yet that this would be the band's last album). Blame it on the general narrowness of the metal formula that the record, stripped of the band's traditional grossness, sounds monotonous and devoid of individu­ality — a flaw that would have been more forgivable on an old school pop record, perhaps. But as long as you're cool with that general formula, Swansong should be a thumbs up all the way, and a perfect way to switch off one's career: now that the band has «matured» to the state of complete adulthood, there's no way further but down, and disbanding was the most natural thing to do.

SURGICAL STEEL (2013)
1) 1985; 2) Thrasher's Abattoir; 3) Cadaver Pouch Conveyor System; 4) A Congealed Clot Of Blood; 5) The Master Butcher's Apron; 6) Noncompliance To ASTM F 899-12 Standard; 7) The Granulating Dark Satanic Mills; 8) Unfit For Human Consumption; 9) 316L Grade Surgical Steel; 10) Captive Bolt Pistol; 11) Mount Of Execution; 12*) A Wraith In The Apparatus; 13*) Intensive Battery Brooding.
Legendary bands never really die — they just build up anticipation for a reunion tour. In the case of Carcass, this happened as early as 2007, and they even got Amott to take a break from Arch Enemy and rejoin. However, by the time they were ready to re-enter the studio, Amott left once again, so the resulting album was made by the trio of Steer, Walker, and new drummer Dan Wilding, whose style, it is said, reminded the band very much of original drummer Ken Owen's (Ken was debilitated by a hemorrhage and could not play, but, in a carcass-sweet gesture, they still invited him to provide some backing voc... uh, grunts).
Asking the common question of «can they still cut it?» is commonly senseless, because of course they can — had they not been able to keep up with past standards of loudness, speed, heaviness, and grossness, this album would have never been made. A better, and tougher, question is «is there still any reason left for them to cut it?», because the entire (relatively brief) career of Car­cass had been about evolving, and unless they convincingly show that they can pick up from where they left off with Swansong and show new paths of activity for the 21st century, Surgical Steel is pretty much bound to find itself in the used instrument bin.
Adding up the style and quality of the riffs, the production values, and the ambiguous nature of song titles and lyrics (which has more than a few nods to the early goregrind values, but also hearkens back to the sociopolitical angle of Swansong), Surgical Steel finds itself closer to Heart­work, I'd say, than any other Carcass record — which is hardly surprising, considering how Heartwork has emerged as the most fondly remembered album of 'em all. Elements of almost perverse melodicity shine through beginning with the very first track (ʽThrasher's Abat­toirʼ), where Walker growl-sings strings of polysyllabic words to a sped-up Sabbath-style riff, concluding that "Hipsters and posers I abhor / Welcome to the thrasher's abattoir" — a nice amal­gamation of the band's morgue grossness and social stance all in one. (So now you know who was actually pictured on the front sleeve of Putreficiation — hipsters and posers!).
That said, like on Heartwork, any perceived melodicity here serves one and only one purpose, and by 2013, we should have all learned that purpose by heart. That all the songs immediately merge into one big ball of thrashing riffs, histrionic solos, and werewolf growls, is a self-under­stood limitation of the genre. Problem is, there's hardly anything else to it: the band's sense of humor is not very efficient, the social message is not working, and they have not really developed any new musical ideas — all that «now we're playing fast... and now we're playing very fast without losing the melodic edge» schtick is already so familiar that only a total novice could be properly amazed at the way they're doing it.
The last track, ʽMount Of Executionʼ, is their first (I think) attempt at a massive epic, a sort of revision of Biblical history where the events of Golgotha are perceived as the signal for a "dark mobilization" (well, it's Carcass, what do you want? not exactly the house band for love, mercy, and forgiveness), and it's got an acoustic introduction, some old school metal riffage, and on the whole sounds more like a mix of Sabbath and Amorphis than a band that once vied with Napalm Death for supremacy on the grindcore field. Repeated listens turn it into a clear favorite, but it's still just one track, and, unsurprisingly, the least Carcass-ish of 'em all. The rest all sound kinda cool while they're on, but fade into oblivion exactly fifteen seconds after they're gone.
Incidentally, one of the bonus tracks on the Japanese edition, called ʽIntensive Battery Broodingʼ, sounds almost exactly like Sabbath ­— in fact, they could have done a generous deed and donated it to Iommi for his 13 project (on the other hand, it lifts a crucial chord change from ʽInto The Voidʼ, so maybe they'd be too embarrassed to hand Tony a variation on his own music). This just goes to show how much the band has «regressed» back to heavy rock values of the 1970s, which is indeed in line with their development in the 1990s — but also suggests that this is sort of the natural way to go, as you just cannot keep chugging out the same radical thrash / grindcore riffs forever, if you think of yourself as a musician rather than a sonic entertainer. Unfortunately, it's way too hard to be just a heavy metal musician and retain your own unmistakable identity, and lack of identity is what Surgical Steel suffers from the most, even as it keeps kicking your putrefying, suppurating, crepitating, virulently ruptured ass all the way through.
ADDENDA
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE... CARCASS (1996)
1) Edge Of Darkness; 2) Emotional Flatline; 3) Ever Increasing Circles; 4) Blood Splattered Banner; 5) I Told You So (Corporate Rock Really Does Suck); 6) Buried Dreams; 7) No Love Lost; 8) Rot 'n' Roll; 9) Edge Of Darkness; 10) This Is Your Life; 11) Rot 'n' Roll; 12) Tools Of The Trade; 13) Pyosified (Still Rotten To The Gore); 14) Hepatic Tissue Fermentation II; 15) Genital Grinder II; 16) Hepatic Tissue Fermentation; 17) Exhume To Consume.
An essential compilation for the band's loyal fans: released one year after Swansong, it collects most of the stuff that was only previously available on EPs and a bunch of outtakes and BBC Radio 1 performances that were not available at all. A couple of the songs repeat themselves (which is a little annoying, because the live versions are predictably hard to tell apart from the studio takes, except for worse sound quality), and a few more have since been added as bonus tracks to the remastered CD edition of Necroticism, but even so, with a total running length of 75 minutes, this is as much prime fresh rotten Carcass as one can stand.
Curiously, the tracks are sequenced «backwards», beginning with a bunch of outtakes from the Swansong sessions that I like much more than a true fan probably should — I think the basic riff of ʽEdge Of Darknessʼ, for instance, is one of the most terrifyingly melodic things they ever did, but, of course, it sounds way too much like Tony Iommi or any «regular», old-school-influenced metal band, so hardcore fans would give it the cold shoulder. ʽBlood Splattered Bannerʼ (a song about the old Dixie, with all of Carcass' grindgore imagery fanatically applied to the conservative South) is another relative highlight that could have benefited from cleaner vocals to go along with its political message, but even so, the riffage (a fun kind of wobble which you'd pretty much expect from a blood splattered banner, I guess) is impeccable. ʽI Told You So (Corporate Rock Really Does Suck)ʼ is a little less memorable, and besides, I am not sure if this particular track, which sounds fairly acceptable for MTV standards, really has the most convincing musical struc­ture and texture to count as a true anti-corporate anthem.
Skipping the four live tracks, we arrive at EP material — Tools Of The Trade from 1992 and the two additional tracks on the Heartwork maxi-single. Of these, ʽRot 'n' Rollʼ is probably the most fun, alternating between military-martial mid-tempo and speedy metal-boogie (and "let's ROT!" should have always functioned as the band's prime slogan — if I find out they never tossed this into the crowd at any of their shows, I'd be much disappointed), whereas all the songs from Tools Of The Trade pretty much sound like anything on Necroticism — fast, ravaging, ridiculous, and not individually memorable. Finally, the last three tracks, taken off some obscure «various artists compilations», seem to date from even earlier periods (Symphonies Of Sickness era?) and re­mind us of the good old times when making out even one single word without the aid of a lyrics sheet would make you a genius of a practicing phonetician.
For the record, ʽExhume To Con­sumeʼ is a different version here from the one on Symphonies: slightly cleaner, and featuring a thirty-second necro-psychedelic intro with various weird threa­tening guitar noises — also, that unexpectedly melodic guitar solo in the middle is brought much higher in the mix. Maybe the idea was that they had to show themselves off a little bit more in terms of musicianship on a compilation, surrounded by such worthy competing acts as Cadaver, Carnage, Godflesh, Hell­bastard, and Terrorizer (can you distinguish between all these bands?), or maybe I'm imagining things, but in any case, this one comes across as slightly «artsier» than it used to be. Nothing like an atmospheric intro to sweeten the impact of goregrind brutality.
In any case, for an outsider like myself the most «fun» part about this whole disc is that it rolls the tape backwards, and lets you revisit once more, over a short time period (especially if you throw out the somewhat superfluous Radio 1 tracks), the (almost) complete evolution of Carcass: now, however, in a mode of «backwards degradation» from an almost normal, classic-influenced metal band to the formless-nameless-dyslexic monster they used to be. Whatever one might think of heavy metal's formulaic limitations and its tendency to fall back upon self-parody, Wake Up And Smell The... is an obvious demonstration of how it is possible to evolve even within a rigid­ly set paradigm — and how it also makes total sense to break up once no further evolution be­comes possible, instead of persisting within the same repetitive formula for decades.

CAROL OF HARVEST