GOREAPHOBIA

With their old-school death metal vibe, slightly technical guitar work, and unyielding underground cred, it's not surprising that Philadelphia's GOREAPHOBIA were part of the Relapse Records family in its earliest days. What is surprising, however, that these contemporaries of REVENANT and RESURRECTION are alive and well in 2009, and have only now gotten around to releasing their debut album!

And since it's unlikely that many will care outside the graying circle of hessians who were there back then and still remember, it's a good thing "Mortal Repulsion" basically sounds like a release from 1992. The vocals are agonal croaks, devoid of excessive processing or gimmickry, while the guitars are heavy, natural-sounding, and tuned in a range of frequencies that wouldn't sound out of place twenty years ago. It's not an obviously low-budget recording, like it was done on a shoestring (though I don't imagine it happened any other way) — the sound is full and dynamic, with plenty of atmosphere and even some malignant melody here and there. And after a fatiguing decade-plus of death metal contorting itself into faster/heavier/gurglier science experiments, it's kinda refreshing to hear a band who concentrate instead on writing music.

And the tunes on "Mortal Repulsion" kill -- from the ratcheting blasts of the title track, to the doomy reprise of "Faded Into Ends", to the head-down midtempo chug of "Grave Plagued Planet", this is death metal at its most primeval. GOREAPHOBIA play the kind of DM that spawned black metal — there's a droning atmosphere in their simplest passages, and a scraping, raw malevolence that's more cold and evil than a hundred gore-grind malcontents. Indeed, just check out the slow, sinister creak of "Despised and Ruined" and "Black Ash Eyes" to hear GOREAPHOBIA tap a direct line into the dessicated veins of HELLHAMMER and BATHORY! And note the beginning of "Primal Nothingness", which exhibits some of the same evolutionary tendencies as early IMMOLATION and INCANTATION (whose John McEntee is now a member of GOREAPHOBIA, as well as their label chief). Hell, you can even hear a little bit of DECEASED in the sick, moody thrash of tracks like "Ordeal of the Abyss" — all of the aforementioned bands basically clawing their way out of the same primal soup back then, fed on thrash, trad-metal, punk, crust, and embryonic death and black metal.

It could be argued (if you were a dick) that GOREAPHOBIA, because they come across like a stew of their peers' early influences without adding their own stamp to things or evolving much since Max Headroom was on television, are a third-rate throwback. To me, though, they're more like a band frozen in time — if we'd gotten their debut in 1992, then sure, who knows what they'd have come up with four or five records later? But they're the unfrozen cavemen of death metal, stepping back into the craft after a long breakup, with their signature sound "on pause" for a few aeons. Besides, their forte is well-written songs — not catchy in a hooky, verse-chorus-verse sense, but in the ability to come up with memorable riffs and vocal lines, arranged with attention to detail and an innate sense of dynamics and flow. And a good song is a good song, regardless of prevailing fashion or the whims of time. "Mortal Repulsion" holds up well as a cohesive piece of music, an exercise in tension, buildup and release as much as in brutality and rage — and that, in today's current scene, is all but a forgotten art.

Old-school without retro irony, GOREAPHOBIA are the morbid essence of death metal itself. Definitely well worth your time and support.