Regurgitate
Carnivorous Erection

December 2002
Released: 2000, Relapse
Rating: 3.0/5
Reviewer: JP

Relapse bands often put a smile on my face. This label has the corner on gore-grind an admittedly small sub-genre of metal. Regurgitate are good, quite good in fact but in my mind seem to struggle in that second tier of bands, never quite making it to the level of the big guns Carcass, Cannibal Corpse, Mortician, Impaled, Exhumed and so on.

In case you are not too familiar, Regurgitate are Sweden’s grindcore assassin’s who spewed onto the scene in 1991 and have countless EP’s, demo’s and 7” recordings to their name. Despite a long and illustrious history the name doesn’t seem to leap to peoples minds when you say, “gore metal”. They have a new album out on Oct 29th (the day I wrote this co-incidentally) called HATEFILLED VENGEANCE, so consider this review a little sneak review.



CARNIVOROUS ERECTION carves it’s own little corner in the (meat) market of gore with decent songs, (bloody) splashes of humour and great visuals. The cover alone is worth the price of admission! Another triumph from Wes Benscoter, Relapse’s “in-house” artist! http://www.wesbenscoter.com. Titles like “Pyronecrobestialty”, “Drenched in Cattleblood” and “Escort Service of the Dead” bring great (?!) visual images to mind and the overall packaging is slick with some lyrics included.



Like some bands in the genre Regurgitate go for volume, but not volume, if ya know what I mean. 38 songs clock in at 34 minutes! This has always been my distaste with some of the gore bands, namely short, virtually pointless songs. A fifteen second blast of noise with a funny title is not really a song. It is amusing (once) and perhaps a generous person might say a short burst of aural extremity might serve the point well, but to me it lacks depth, range and power. Regurgitate take a brilliantly gory lyrical concept like “To Boil a Corpse” and drain the life out of it because it doesn’t have a chance to simmer into a full song concept. There are about four or five songs on here that reach the one-minute mark. The verdict is 34 “joke” songs also known as filler and about four minutes of real songs. It is these real songs that salvage this disc from novelty status or worse being irrelevant. No… long songs aren’t the point here at all, but I can’t help but feeling that if you put these songs on random shuffle on your CD player even the band themselves would not be able to identify half of them.



The production is great lots of dirty grind but immaculate production is rarely the hallmark of extremism. The vokills are utterly brutallic, reminding me of Antti from Demilich at times. The drums driving so fast they loose all depth and resonance and the music blurs into one giant mess. In any other review that could be perceived as a negative but not in this instance, that is high praise!



I really feel the band has the talent, creativity, and gory guts to go to the next level if they would drop the novelty short-songs and bust out a real 33 minute death metal album with 10 or 12 utterly crushing songs. Hell, maybe I’m getting old and traditional. Question. Why was track 25 on a 38 track CD called “37 Stabwounds”? Why not have “37 Stabwounds” as track 37 and make it 37 seconds long? Or drop a track off the album? Funny how the mind works…visit these fine gentlemen at http://www.regurgitate.net