ROTTEN - FRANCE

ROTTEN - PLANETS ARE ONLY THERE TO HOST OUR CEMETERIES - ECLECTIC  
In the mood to spend 37 minutes at a time with death metal fiends? Rotten is a band for you. And as a bonus, the French sex-o-maniacs insist that each cover artwork associated with the group be sensual, sexy and seductive.
The album begins with Vomiting The Solar Vermin and the song is all Grave with guttural secretions of bile instead of vocals. It is fast and vicious, about as likely to have a violin, cello, trumpet and whatever is trendy in the (so-called) metal scenes these days as Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella are likely to have something intelligent to say. Putrid Stench Of The Living Membrane slows down, goes death/doom and a crackling bass rears its ugly head. The singer doesn't care. He growls with menace regardless of what his colleagues around him are doing. The song kicks in some psychedeathlic breaks and guitar effects towards the end. The vocals take one back to those lovely Asphyx albums we (that is people of good taste - we are not talking about the masses here) so adored. The song ends with the singer hurling all over his mutant hooker. Apparently, the engineer was too slow to cut off his microphone and so the whole episode - vomit and all - is captured on the recording. Nuclear Spit has a thick Thrower-ish sound and the bass is back in action. The drums are overly simplistic, but, as much as that is true, Rotten does not exist to satisfy Archspire fans anyway. Still, the entire rhythm section seems to be taking the piss, not leaving much of a song behind. Morbid Trip In The Devoured Ship personifies ghoulish bass strums - if that were ever a thing. An actual morbid riff takes early Black Sabbath, attaches an atomic distortion to it, tosses it into a metal time machine and punches it fifty years into the (Obituary/Celtic Frost) future. The song eventually picks up, which is good news if you, like this writer, are not a fan of early Sabbath at all. Obsessed features keyboard, but don't give up on the band by jumping to the next review yet. This is still crunchy with Grave/Obituary vocals. It is slow to mid-paced and the bass lurks everywhere. The keyboards blow, but this remains a Bolt Thrower of a song. The album ends with a snippet of Frank Sinatra's That's Life. No, not a snippet of the ditty's cover version; a snippet of the song itself dubbed smack in the middle of the band's brutality. Frank Sinatra is followed by some twisted demonic noise. This album is that crazy. - Ali "The Metallian"