Aborted. Only a death metal group could get away with a band name like that, especially for almost twenty years. Death metal has made its name by using disturbing, visceral, and often time’s offensive imagery in their music. Aborted may not have started the trend, but they certainly don’t shy away from it. With albums like Engineering the Dead and Goremageddon: The Saw and the Carnage Done, and songs like "Fecal Forgery", Aborted not only abuse this tradition but they glorify it.
The group started in 1995 in Waregem, Belgium by current and only remaining original member Sven de Caluwé. The group didn’t release their first full length until 1999, and have gone on to release five more, their most recent being Necrotic Manifesto, two EPs, and a live DVD. The group plays a more modern form of death metal, as compared to the traditional more thrash-y death metal performed by other current bands, as well as combining elements of grindcore effectively making them a deathgrind band, I guess.
Aborted’s new release, Necrotic Manifesto, is the sixth instalment into the full length catacomb. The group bring a lot of familiar elements with this album including blast beats, a huge vocal performance, and killer solos (literally). The album is the group’s fourth release on Century Media and is, once again, being produced by the capable hands of Jacob Hansen who also recorded Aborted’s Goremageddon: The Saw and the Carnage Done in 2003 and Global Flatline (2011).
In truth, the album sounds like a better quality repeat of the group's previous releases, but there are some gems here. “The Davidian Deceit” offers one of the best solos on the album, and the piece is packed with guest vocals including Vincent Benett (The Acacia Strain) on “Your Entitlement Means Nothing” and Phlegeton (Wormed) on “Excremental Veracity.”
Lyrically, the group uses exactly what you expect from the group. Let’s take the group’s first single, “Coffin Upon Coffin”. The song talks about necrophilia – into the dead I shove my meat, insanity – and carries about twenty pounds of gore in terms of sound. These songs are brutal in the sense of content and sound, but just the names alone are messed up, like “Six Feet of Foreplay”, “An Enumeration of Cadavers”, and my favorite “Cenobites”, a delightful reference to Pinhead and the Hellraiser series.
Aborted have been around almost twenty years now, no small feat for any band, and it’s because of their ferocity and tenacity that they have lasted this long. Caluwé had a vision back when the band started, "I’ll be it a sick and demented dream, but a dream none the less", and he made it happen. Now, after all the hard work has been done the group can revel in the bloody disgusting results… in the best way possible.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1SAjDsnhLk[/youtube]
For more on Aborted check them out on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Abortedofficial) or at their official site (http://www.goremageddon.be/) and don’t forget to pre-order the new album out April 29th.
