Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious
| Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious | ||||
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| Carcass studio album | ||||
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Publication |
October 21, 1991 (Europe), |
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| Label (s) | Earache Records | |||
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Format (s) |
LP, MC, CD |
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Title (number) |
8th |
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running time |
48:03 |
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Studio (s) |
Amazon Studios |
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Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious is the third studio album by British extreme metal band Carcass . With him, the band turned away from grindcore from previous albums and turned to death metal . It was the first album with Michael Amott , who later co-founded Arch Enemy .
Music genre
On the "Necroticism" album, Carcass change their style from the Grindcore-inspired previous albums to " riff-heavy hardness". There are still high-speed passages and blast beats , but these are pervaded by mid-tempo parts or double bass inserts. The songwriting is characterized by breaks and tempo changes . In contrast to the previous albums, the songs are more melodic and technically demanding. The melodic parts partly lead to disharmonies , such as in “Pedigree Butchery”. The structures of the pieces are described as complex, the guitar solos as well thought-out and polished.
There is also Walker's high and hoarse to poisonous-aggressive shouting. Some pieces begin with short samples in which statements that seem scientific are reproduced in a sober voice. They come from TV shows that Jeff Walker recorded for use as samples. The words “you can hear people puking” in the intro to “Pedigree Butchery” come from John Waters , the words “prepare to die” before “Symposium of Sickness” from Herschell Gordon Lewis . The speech samples are usually underlaid with soft keyboard sounds or reverb effects, which contrast with the hard music that follows. What is striking is the clearly better, more differentiated production of the record compared to its predecessors.
In the interview, Carcass distance himself from both Grindcore and Death Metal: “If we're honest, we don't even know what 'Grindcore' is. It has little to do with Carcass. ”At the same time,“ Necroticism ”is the“ most untypical record of Death Metal ”that Carcass have ever made.
“It's total nonsense to call ourselves a grindcore or death metal band. That annoyed us in the past and it still annoys us today. We simply play Carcass music. "
The only term the band sees as justified is "extreme music".
Emergence
Even before the previous album was recorded, Carcass asked the Swedish guitarist Michael Amott from Carnage . Jeff Walker described the addition of a second guitarist as a necessary next step in the band's musical development. Amott declined, but said he regretted this decision when he first heard the finished album “Symphonies of Sickness”. When the band asked him again in early 1990, he immediately agreed and in April 1990 flew to Great Britain to rehearse with the band. The trio Steer, Walker and Owen had already written most of the material. Amott contributed some riffs and harmonies to "Incarnated Solvent Abuse" and "Corporal Jigsaw Quandary". The band recorded some of the songs in Steer's parents' house on a four-track device as a demo . Owen composed “Symposium of Sickness” on an acoustic guitar and Steer transposed it to guitar tabs .
For the recordings the Slaughterhouse Studio was originally intended, in which Colin Richardson worked as a sound engineer . After he was fired, Richardson went into business for himself as a music producer . He recommended the band to the Amazon studio in Simonswood near Liverpool . Since Carcass had separated from their Earache label after the release of “Symphonies of Sickness” because they wanted to be independent, they had to finance the studio from their own resources. They had a budget of £ 16,000 available that the band had saved from previous record sales. At the beginning of July 1991 the quartet went to the studio. The band hadn't rehearsed the vocals, nor had Walker learned the bass parts. For this reason, parts of the recordings had to be repeated up to ten times. When the base tracks were recorded, the financial means were exhausted. Earache's Digby Pearson offered Carcass a new contract. The band accepted in order to finish the recordings for the album. In total, the studio, production and mix cost around £ 25,000.
Content and design
The album was originally just supposed to be called "Descanting the Insalubrious". Ken Owen came up with the idea, the phrase means something like "to tear all the disgusting badness out of a human body". Jeff Walker wanted to give the title a meaning in the direction of sexual perversion and put the word "Necroticism" in front. This is the combination of the prefix “necro” ( English for death) and the ending “-ticism”, which is supposed to stand for fetishism . Musically, the album represented the band's departure from pure grindcore. For the first time, Carcass mainly used elements of death metal. The album was later classified as deathcore .
Because of the texts interspersed with medical terms, the rumor circulated that Carcass were medical students. This was not true:
"Absolutely everything about that drowned and lies. I myself always needed a dictionary for my texts. The trick was to express something that was totally simple and banal, so sick, extreme and medical that not even the English understood the meaning of the lyrics. "
The guitar solos have names and ambiguities are hidden in the lyrics. "Incarnate Solvent Abuse" is about the fact that an adhesive is made from human remains that you could sniff and get intoxicated. The band alludes to the sniffing of glue that was widespread among the poorer classes in their youth, one of the guitar solos of the song is called “glue sniffing”. "Carneous Cacoffiny" is about a human tissue using meat grinder guitar strings to produce.
The cover differs from the earlier collages of pictures of body parts and autopsy photos because the band feared that this could make it difficult to sell the record freely. For lack of funds, the band decided to use a photomontage made up of black and white photographs of the members. The pictures were taken shortly before by photographer Ian Tilton at drummer Ken Owen's house. Walker came up with the idea of making the cover look like a hospital room. In the middle of the cover are the four photos of the band members, above which medical or pathological instruments are arranged. To the left of this is a rolling table with further instruments, based on Owen's father's veterinary instruments. In the lower left corner is a garbage can with Jeff Walker's bloodied upper arm protruding from it. In the lower right corner of the upper body is a pathologist in the plan view to see hitting with a hammer on the blood-smeared photomontage. This hammer belonged to Mark Griffiths of Cathedral , with whom Walker was living at the time.
The band's only criticism of the design of the album was the numerous spelling mistakes in the medical terms.
On the print of the actual original sound carrier, i.e. the CD itself (the LP had a black print), pathological instruments arranged in a circle were shown in black on a red background. The first edition up to around the beginning of 1992 did not show this feature. The cover of the EP Tools of Trade , which followed the album in 1992, was designed in a similar way, but as a photo. This design idea was taken up on the “backdrop”, the poster on the back of the stage, on the Gods of Grind tour with Entombed , Cathedral and Confessor , on which Carcass were headliners , and corresponded to the unusual round shape of the supporting structure the lighting system above the stage.
reception
Jason Birchmeier from Allmusic sees the album as the liberation of the band from the boundaries set by grindcore and describes it as one of the best death metal albums of the early 1990s. The Rock Hard notes in its review that the band, despite the strong influences from Death Metal, does not offer the sound patterns and song structures that were common in the genre at the time. The songs are "technically demanding" and "well thought out" and contain "surprisingly melodic" parts. In the book "Best of Rock & Metal" by the German rock-hard magazine, Necroticism is ranked 294 out of 500. Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann speaks of a “quantum leap in terms of quality”, praises the “weird genius” and sees the record as “the strongest work” by Carcass.
Cover versions of songs from this album
The piece Corporal Jigsore Quandary was u. a. Covered by the hardcore techno / death metal band The Berzerker (on their album Dissimulate , which was also released by Earache).
Track list
- Inpropagation (Owen / Steer)
- Corporal Jigsore Quandary (Steer / Owen / Amott)
- Symposium of Sickness (Owen)
- Pedigree Butchery (Steer)
- Incarnated Solvent Abuse (Amott / Steer)
- Carneous Cacoffiny (Steer)
- Lavaging Expectorate of Lysergide Composition (Steer)
- Forensic Clinicism / The Sanguine Article (Steer)
All lyrics were written by Jeff Walker. The Earache Records label re- released the album in 2003; The bonus tracks included three tracks from the 1992 EP “ Tools of the Trade ”, the title track “Tools of the Trade”, “Rotten to the Gore” and “Hepatic Tissue Fermentatio”.
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Wolf-Rüdiger Mühlmann: Carcass - Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious . In: Rock Hard (Ed.): Best of Rock & Metal - The 500 strongest records of all time . HEEL Verlag, Königswinter 2007, ISBN 978-3-89880-517-9 , p. 95 .
- ^ Natalie J. Purcell: Death Metal Music. The Passion and Politics of a Subculture . McFarland, 2003, ISBN 978-0-7864-1585-4 , pp. 61 .
- ^ Natalie J. Purcell: Death Metal Music. The Passion and Politics of a Subculture . McFarland, 2003, ISBN 978-0-7864-1585-4 , pp. 22 .
- ↑ Götz Kühnemund: Carcass. Art instead of chaos? In: Rock Hard, No. 57, January 1992.
- ↑ Review in Decibel Magazine, Issue 11 (September 2005)
- ↑ cf. Rock Hard # 198
- ↑ Jason Birchmeier: Review of "Necroticism". Allmusic, accessed January 3, 2009 .
- ↑ Götz Kühnemund: Review of "Necroticism" . In: Rock Hard . No. 56 .
swell
- Volkmar Weber: Classic Albums: "Necroticism - Descanting The Insalubrious" (1992) . In: Rock Hard . No. 198 .
- J. Bennett: Rotten to the Gore. The Making of Carcass' Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious . In: Albert Mudrian (Ed.): Precious Metal. Decibel Presents the Story Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces . Da Capo Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-306-81806-6 , pp. 130-141 .