Imagine taking fecal samples from early days Carcass, Exhumed, and Autopsy and smearing them all on rye toast. The titanic shit sandwich you’d create would be Portland’s own Dripping Decay. Why you would be smearing fecal samples on toast in the first place, I don’t know, but it seems appropriate considering the cesspool that Dripping Decay drips and spews all over their Festering Grotesqueries debut. This is a truly rancid dose of punky death-grinding, ass-blasting noise with only the most putrid bells and whistles utilized. Taking cues from classic grind, most songs are kept in the 2-3 minute window and the whole enterprise runs a scant 37 minutes. It’s a scuzzy, blasty, infectious rip ride, more fun than a mass grave full of dead clowns, and a hundred times easier to find.1 Are you ready for the Drip?
From the face-flaying launch of “Autocannibal Ecstacy” onward, you know you’re in an industrial meat grinder set to “Pulpify.” I haven’t the foggiest notion what an autocannibal is, but I know the song is a furious death ditty with berserk riffs and ghastly vocals flying in all directions like explosive vomit. It’s belligerent and chaotic and gets you on board immediately with its horrid gravitas. Frantic d-beating is the medium and madness on “Abundant Cadaveric Waste” and no effort is wasted putting your face in the hog troth and feeding you unspeakable filth. “Gut Mucher” reeks of Symphonies of Sickness in all the best ways and the doomy darkness of “Watching You Rot” borrows many pages from early Autopsy’s murder journals.
Perhaps the most enjoyable moment arrives with “Cremator,” which feels like a loving homage to Slaughter’s immortal Strappado opus and “Disintegrator/Incinerator” in particular. It’s so Slaughter that it actually hurts and it packs all the retro charm of that classic chestnut.2 Track after track rips the band-aid off your raw skin and shoves slime leeches in the wound leaving you screaming for more. Whether it’s the Leprosy-esque approach that surfaces at times on “Chemical Lobotomy” or the fat, brutish grooves of “Sadistic Excruciator,” Dripping Decay put on a trauma clinic on how to write in-your-face raw, ugly death metal with a healthy grind influence while keeping things catchy as fook. This is just big, stupid mutant caveman fun and it gets under your skin like an alien sex parasite. The secret sauce is pus plasma and the Mr. Corpse patented drip system keeps it flowing loud and proud throughout the album’s perfectly concise runtime which is over in a nuclear flash leaving you stunned and reaching for the replay mechanism. Problems? Some of the 12 proper tracks are less wham-bam-eat-your-spam than others, but none are bad or require skipping. It’s also fair to say this style has been done many times before and Dripping Decay don’t bring anything especially new to rotpit. When the slime-encrusted brutality is this much fun though, who really cares?
Neil Smith’s classic death leads and ginormous grooves power the Drip delivery system and he skillfully plays with dread-inducing Winter-esque doom and scathing thrash as required to shake your feeble brain into jelly, keeping everything imbued with a vigorous punky energy. Sometimes his phrasing is very Schuldiner-esque, invoking the early days of Death, and other times there’s a distinct Autopsy-adjacent serial killer vibe to his playing. At no point does he lapse into stock chugs though there are mammoth chug grooves present and accounted for. Eric Stucke’s vocals should be ringfenced and condemned for public safety. He’s got the unhinged charm of Chris Reifert and also channels Carcass’ Bill Steer and Slaughter’s Dave Hewson as things descend into madness gravy and cheese turds. Meanwhile, Jason Adam Borton runs amok on the kit, force-feeding the listener hyperactive blastbeats and brutal grinding sections as he sees fit, making you motion nauseous in the process. The whole package is designed to disorient and entertain and it does that in grave spades.
Festering Grotesqueries is one helluva fun, disgusting platter of bodily fluid splatter and there’s a lot to like about what Dripping Decay pull off on their rollicking, rumbling debut. It’s more than the sum of its body parts and it gets better and better as it rolls along. I just keep hitting that replay thingee and letting all the vileness come back around. Put Dripping Decay in the IV and leave me hooked in, Uncle Fester.
Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Satanik Royality
Websites: drippingdecay.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/drippingdecay
Releases Worldwide: August 18th, 2023
