Carcass - Splatter Symphonies

From time to time, someone in the history of rock crosses a boundary that no one had ever ventured beyond. In some cases, due to the dominant Anglo-American culture of this musical genre and the power dynamics of the record industry, such boundary-crossing is carried out by English acts. Liverpool is a city with few equals in the world in this respect: not only did it give birth to the famous Beatles, but it can also boast being the hometown of dozens of musicians who made history in international pop and rock, sometimes just for a single hit, sometimes for having changed the course of history. Among Liverpool's many bands, 25 years after the Beatles were born, a project emerges that couldn't be further from the Fab Four, starting with the unsettling name chosen, “carcass”, meaning the body of a dead animal.

The aesthetic that Carcass defined in the first part of their career, that is from 1985 to 1996, pushed extremity in sound, lyrics, and even artwork into uncharted territory, places where the many bands that inspired them had never reached, or had at most taken a few timid steps toward. More precisely, Carcass combined the sonic power of death metal with the extremist punk-hardcore spirit of grindcore through cover photographs of mutilated corpses, lyrics packed with splatter references and a sound that was convulsive, brutal and brazen, with a chaotic, at times even naive, experimental streak.

Over the course of their first three albums they christened a new subgenre, goregrind, with its distinctive use of pitch-shifted vocals, the alternation between supersonic blasts and more measured, armor-plated passages, and a total obsession with the most atrocious pathologies and horrors that could be linked to the workings of the human body. On two further albums they pushed that initial style toward a death metal that could be ferocious and melodic at the same time, pointing the way for many bands at the end of the millennium.

Legendary standard-bearers of English sonic extremism, armed with a sound full of abominable monstrosities, they plunged the most violent rock of the early Eighties into a cacophonous broth saturated with obscenity, violence and disgust, before transforming it in the Nineties into a far more lethal, surgical sound machine. In the year when the most important chapter of their career came to a close, 1996, the Internet witnessed the birth of one of the most shocking websites ever, the infamous Rotten.com: in some way, Carcass are the musical version, ante litteram, of those nauseating atrocities the site showed its visitors—autopsy photos, acts of extreme violence, sexual perversions, mutilations and other revolting content—all feeding that morbid curiosity to explore death and pain that is one of the many manifestations of the complexity of the human mind.

"Rotten To The Gore": the goregrind years (1985-1991)

Born in 1969, William "Bill" Geoffrey Steer spent his teenage years listening to English hard rock and heavy metal acts such as Motörhead, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, UFO, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Raven, Tank and Venom. In 1985, while still at school, he formed a band with drummer Ken Owen, in which he played electric guitar. The project quickly fell apart, as Steer threw himself into another outfit, Disattack, who played a particularly aggressive and politicized brand of punk-hardcore. When Disattack's bassist left the band, Jeffrey "Jeff" Walker stepped in.

In 1986 Bill Steer also joined Napalm Death, replacing Justin Broadrick (later of Godflesh) and recording the landmark "Scum" (1987), whose cover was in fact designed by Jeff Walker. Disattack changed their name, becoming the new Carcass: the lineup featured the aforementioned Bill Steer and Jeff Walker, joined by singer Andrew "Sanjiv" Pek and drummer Ken Owen.

With this lineup they recorded their first demo, Flesh Ripping Sonic Torment (1987), before Sanjiv left the band. Without even finding a replacement, Carcass recorded their debut for Earache in just four days, with the three musicians trading off on vocals. It was called Reek Of Putrefaction (1988), and it's one of the most malevolent, brutal records in the history of music, so violent and disgusting it's disorienting. It boasts a staggering 22 tracks, often under two minutes long, split across two sides labeled with anything but subtlety: "Side One: Faecal Disarticulation" and "Side Two: Anal Disgorgement". The song titles on the tracklist are a blend of medical terminology and splatter-movie depravity, and the lyrics are unspeakable, steeped in horrific diseases, unspeakable torments and medical jargon. To give an idea, the first sung track describes a person vomiting up their own organs:

The overall effect is almost hallucinatory, not least because the murky, disjointed, distorted and incomprehensible sound that batters the listener's eardrums offers few footholds, coming across as a single, nearly 40-minute-long sequence of repulsive musical perversions. As would emerge years later, the unintelligible sound wasn't an aesthetic choice but the result of inexperience and naivety. As if that weren't enough, the album's cover features a collage of autopsy photographs that didn't fail to stir controversy and censorship, even though it seems to be referencing the medieval image of the devil devouring corpses.

"Regurgitation Of Giblets" is the moment the assault truly begins, after the opening "Genital Grinder", amid coarse vocal retching and drum-machine-gun bursts, while the entire low end of the sonic spectrum is held hostage by deafening, distorted bass and guitar. Every so often a detail stands out within the unbroken sequence of sonic torture, like the shrill, disjointed guitar solo on "Pyosisified (Rotten To The Gore)", a chaotic take on Slayer, or the lowered, guttural vocals of "Carbonized Eye Sockets", or again the deafening blast of "Frenzied Detruncation", and the mad accelerations of "Microwaved Uterogestation". "Burnt To A Crisp" comes closest to being an actual song, albeit in a decomposed and terrifying form, and still with lyrics swollen with sadistic horror:

Burnt to a crisp

Your fat's on fire

Devouring you whole

Like a cadaver-stoked pyre

Surprisingly, famed radio DJ John Peel, who considered the album his favorite of 1988, brought Carcass in for the first of his famous sessions.

These recordings, broadcast in 1989 and 1990, would later be collected on The Earache Peel Sessions (2014), a compilation that deserves the attention of anyone wanting to grasp the power of those early albums in a frighteningly intense form. It's not far-fetched to say that tracks like "Reek Of Putrefaction" or "Fermenting Innards" find their definitive versions in these recordings.

 

The more ambitious and professional Symphonies Of Sickness (1989) benefits from a far better production, courtesy of Colin Richardson, but loses some of the debut's scrambled, deliriously blind fury, becoming relatively more musical. There are ten tracks instead of the debut's 22, and alongside speed they also show a more developed sense for managing tension (for instance in "Ruptured In Purulence" and "Embryonic Necropsy And Devourment"), guitar solos (listen to "Cadaveric Incubator Of Endoparasites"), and precision of execution. While Reek Of Putrefaction is so chaotic that it conceals many of its influences, on this second album the links to death metal and certain extreme thrash metal are more evident, from the already-mentioned Slayer to Repulsion, via Death and going as far back as Black Sabbath.

On more than one occasion, certain choices can easily be traced back to the German thrash metal scene as well, Kreator in particular, their contemporaries. The opener "Reek Of Putrefaction" opens precisely on those feral Iommi-style riffs, before morphing into a furious death metal blended with savage grindcore attacks, which would lead to this album being filed under deathgrind. But overall, the songwriting is on a whole other level, as "Exhume To Consume" demonstrates, restless and devastating without ever becoming chaotic; the lyrics remain as revolting as ever in their detailed, morbid creativity, and among other things also tackle necrophagia:

Caskets I grate

My larder's a grave

I’m sickly obsessed (with the badly decomposed)

Rotten remains I eat

Purulent meat

What a funeral feast (putrid reek)

The addition of Carnage guitarist Michael Amott helps make the third album Necroticism: Descanting The Insalubrious (1991) a batch of eight tracks built more around guitars than around percussive power or sheer sonic violence. Carcass are increasingly and clearly morphing into a death metal band obsessed with splatter, and on this album they do so by leaning into more progressive and technical territory, favouring medium-to-long songs split into sections, carefully arranged and full of solos, a far cry from their early days.

"Corporal Jigsore Quandary" is probably the masterpiece of this transitional period, ferocious yet razor-sharp, wildly rhythmic yet elaborate in its structure, but overall, in retrospect, the album remains squeezed between the grindcore/deathgrind period and the melodic death metal era just around the corner. The lyrics, for the last time so explicitly, keep up their descriptions of atrocities and perversions, starting with the title itself, a blend of "necrosis" and "eroticism" describing an alleged arousal towards corpses.

"Keep On Rotting In The Free World": the death metal period (1992-1996)

 

Tools Of The Trade (1992) is an EP whose merit lies in delivering "Pyosified" from Reek Of Putrefaction in a far more mature version, thanks to a new recording labelled "still rotten to the gore". More than the two new tracks, it's the lengthy "Hepatic Tissue Fermentation" — released in a different version only on a largely unknown compilation — that deserves attention: six and a half minutes of Carcass split between grindcore and deathgrind, almost serving as a farewell to the first chapter of their career, now drawing to a close.

Released in 1993 at home and only in 1994 in the United States, in the latter case through major label Columbia, the fourth studio album Heartwork is in fact a rare case of a sonic compromise that fits seamlessly into a band's stylistic evolution, preserving its spirit despite clear melodic concessions. Presented with a cover depicting a visionary work by H. R. Giger, it comprises ten tracks with a devastating, well-defined sound, alternating extreme intensity with melodic pauses, crushing accelerations and atmospheric slowdowns. The lyrics, though less explicit than before, still blend splatter with a strange sense of humour.

The unstable explosive material of before is now channelled into far more structured compositions, such as "Carnal Forge", and often slows down in search of armour-plated midtempos rather than breathless bursts of speed, as underlined by the groove-laden melodic death metal of "No Love Lost".

On the title track, Carcass strike a rare balance, combining grindcore, deathgrind and melodic death metal into a multifaceted track, savage yet also immediate. They repeat the trick, though with fewer concessions to accessibility, on "Arbeit Macht Fleisch".

For guitarists, it's an irresistible feast of riffs and solos, so much so that on "This Mortal Coil" and "Death Certificate" even the vocals take a back seat to the onslaught of axes. The influence of Iron Maiden and their guitar harmonies is evident. Listening closely, one can also detect a move towards rock'n'roll, at least in some elements of the compositional syntax, albeit heavily bastardised with death metal in a hybrid often labelled death'n'roll, also practiced by Sweden's Entombed and the Netherlands' Gorefest. So, while on some tracks of Heartwork Carcass seem to have found a mature style reminiscent of the Metallica of the so-called "Black Album", with its more moderate speeds and melodies sharing the spotlight, elsewhere the Englishmen return to a taste for rock'n'roll on steroids first pioneered years earlier by fellow countrymen Motorhead and Venom.

Heartwork widens the band's appeal to the point of making Carcass one of the reference points for the entire European death-metal scene of the period. The more generalist rock press finally catches on to their music, pushing commercial results beyond the boundaries of the underground. Columbia, which had already handled the release in the United States, is ready to turn the Englishmen into metal superstars, at least in intent, with their fifth album.

 

With Amott gone, replaced by guitarist Carlo Regadas, the band gets to work on the follow-up to Heartwork with trusted producer Colin Richardson, but the record label's support is no longer there: it doesn't seem to agree with the artistic direction to be taken, and perhaps Carcass are also worn out after years of hard work. They return to Earache and Swansong (1996), with its prophetic title, comes across as a minor work, with leaner arrangements and modest power. Having lost their combativeness, what remains is craft and irony, so it's hard to find a classic in the tracklist that can stand alongside those of their past. “Black Star” is a credible candidate, but it still wouldn't stand out on the previous Heartwork. Curiously, it's an album that pushes harder on political messages, however surface-level, while almost completely giving up the splatter imagery.

“Eleanor Rigor Mortis”: the death and resurrection of Carcass (1997-2023)

 

From the title of the fifth album alone, it's clear that the band is in deep crisis. There won't even be a farewell tour and it seems that Steer had already left the project back in 1996. Ironically, the chart results are surprising, despite the lack of shows in support of the latest release. To capitalize on this moment of fame comes a compilation of rarities, Wake Up and Smell The… Carcass (1996), with a photo of a dead John Kennedy on the cover. The tracks collected show that some of the leftovers from Swansong would indeed have enriched the tracklist; it also gathers other songs previously released on Eps. It remains a release for the most curious fans. The subsequent best of Choice Cuts (2004), which sums up their career, might come in handy for the laziest listeners.

 

Owen, Walker and Regadas, together with Cathedral bassist Mark Griffiths, form the short-lived and dubiously relevant hard rock outfit Blackstar, also hampered by Owen's serious health problems. Amott founds Spiritual Beggars, another hard-rock venture, and above all the Swedish band Arch Enemy, who will carry forward and bring to a wider audience a sonic hybrid similar to the one inaugurated on Heartwork, but fronted by a female vocalist. Steer, evidently intent on distancing himself as much as possible from his past, forms Firebird, somewhere between blues-rock and stoner-rock elements.

Only in 2006 does talk of a reunion begin, and so, in 2007, Carcass come back to celebrate themselves, in the Steer-Walker-Amott lineup joined by new drummer Daniel Erlandsson (also in Arch Enemy and Brujeria). In 2008, to accompany an international tour that takes them as far as Australia and South America, they reissue their entire catalogue. Only in 2012, as the fitting close of this intense touring period, do Amott and Erlandsson leave Carcass to focus on Arch Enemy.

 

In the end, the sixth studio album also arrives, Surgical Steel (2013), the first in 17 years, with Walker and Steer helped by drummer Daniel Wilding. They release it on Nuclear Blast. In the meantime, melodic death-metal had thrilled fans for years, before running out of creative steam under an excessive glut of bands. As welcome as it is to see Carcass return to the studio, the English band risks often mimicking either their own heirs or themselves. The relative surprise is that, having fully shelved the more restrained Swansong, they've come back to pick up where Heartwork left off, as immediately made clear by “Thrasher’s Abbatoir” and “Cadaver Pouch Conveyor System”, returning to layered arrangements, bestial roars and grindcore guts mixed with death-metal's devastating power. The progressive complexity of Necroticism also returns, in the elaborate “Noncompliance To ASTM F899-12 Standard”.

The remarkable intensity eases off a little in the second half of the tracklist, with the lengthy “Mount Of Execution” showing clear melodic elements across its eight-plus minutes, as well as clearly paying tribute to Iron Maiden's galloping rhythms.

 

For the history of heavy metal Surgical Steel doesn't count for much, but for Carcass it's a way to rewrite their own career and start over from before the drift of Swansong. It's also a chance to win over the critics, who in the meantime have come to recognize these mad Englishmen as having played a primary role in pushing sonic extremity beyond its own boundaries.

The Ep Surgical Remission/Surplus Steel (2014), with the viciousness of “Livestock Marketplace”, and also the compilation The Best Of Carcass (2016) capitalize on this renewed interest.

 

The shows keep coming, and in due course the seventh album also arrives, Torn Arteries (2021), delayed because of the pandemic and preceded by the Ep Despicable (2020), buoyed by the elaborate carnage of “The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue”. Another splendid cover, featuring a human heart made of food in the style of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, presents ten more tracks of melodic, progressive death-metal, with lyrics once again obsessed with splatter, death and black humour (one track is called “Eleanor Rigor Mortis”).

This time the intensity and speed often drop a notch, making room for the stately dance of “Dance Of Ixtab (Psychopomp & Circumstance March No. 1 In B)” and the one framed by thrash-metal bursts on the aforementioned “Eleanor Rigor Mortis”. The main reference point certainly remains the sound elaborated between the third and fourth albums, as if Walker and Steer had remained frozen in 1993, and by and large they can still pull it off, balancing craft and passion (though also overreaching on the overly long “Flesh Ripping Sonic Torment Limited”).

 

It almost seems superfluous to point out that these albums by the resurrected Carcass can't be compared to their four classic early-career albums, among which it's actually hard to single out one as better than the others, because they're so different from one another and remarkable for different reasons: Reek Of Putrefaction is full of naivety, recorded in an atrocious way and the product of a still inexperienced band, but it truly inaugurated an aesthetic, standing as their most punk, unrepeatable and unhinged album; Symphonies Of Sickness is what the debut failed to be, that is, it takes those ideas and turns them into a fully realized, even majestic album, certainly more professional and musical, and it's the culmination of the goregrind period, which they would then abandon; Necroticism has been increasingly appreciated over the years by extreme heavy-metal fans and is the album with the most complex, progressive compositions, the formal peak of their discography; Heartwork is a record that, while it divided listeners, had a major impact on metal at the turn of the millennium and still contains some of their best-known and most beloved songs, such as the title track and “No Love Lost”.

This poker hand of releases alone would be enough to make Carcass one of the greatest metal bands of all time, and honestly the rest of their catalogue is a mere side note to what's contained in these four albums, perhaps not perfect but each one capable of taking metal music somewhere it had never been before. Now it may well be that they're coasting on past glories, especially if this is a pretext for bringing their music for sadistic surgeons back on stage and to the public's attention once again.

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