ALBUM REVIEW: Festering Grotesqueries – Dripping Decay

You should never judge a book by its cover, but when it comes to Festering Grotesqueries – the debut album from death metal and grindcore worshippers DRIPPING DECAY – you can get a pretty good feel for what this record is all about. Let’s start with the name; festering, adjective: forming pus, rotten and offensive to the senses; grotesqueries, noun: grotesque quality. Even the band name is foul: DRIPPING DECAY, like there’s so much decomposure that it’s spilling over. The track names don’t let up either: Gut Muncher, Watching You Rot, Abundant Cadaveric Waste. And these names are merely grotesqueries atop this monument to sin, the crowning features above disgusting pillars of rotten flesh and oozing offal. 

Within this house of horrors is a collection of 14 tracks of sonic terror. From the discomforting ambience of opening track Septic Sentient Slime, to the hellfire wielding brutality of Chemical Lobotomy, DRIPPING DECAY are a runaway freight train headed straight to the seventh circle. The malice and malcontent with which Eric Stucke‘s vocals are spewed into existence, Neil Smith‘s guitar grinds and chomps like a rabid beast caged, and Jackson Jordan‘s bass and Jason Bortom‘s drums stomp and clatter like a reanimated Godzilla made of rusted scrap metal – both gross and engrossing.

But amidst all the macabre and masochistic imagery, Festering Grotesqueries doesn’t take itself too seriously. When you’re pushing an image this far, you ought to be a little tongue in cheek, and it’s a valuable lesson well executed by DRIPPING DECAY here. This album is – in its own, weird way – a lot of fun. The frenetic pace rarely lets up, the animalistic noises are both eye opening and ridiculous, and the music toes the line of carefree, while remaining cohesive. Whether it’s the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it screeching guitar solos dropped into Cremator or the churning, bubbling soundscapes of Oozing Into Oblivion (Outro), Festering Grotesqueries feels like a haunted house soundtrack and a tribute to 80s B-movie shlockfests all at once.

At a certain point, tracks do begin to merge into one. When you opt to go this extreme for this long, there’s only so much you can do with it, and it means that the middle of Festering Grotesqueries becomes a bit of a soup. With most tracks comfortably in the two to three-minute range, it means that for over half an hour you may find yourself enduring the tirade of death metal and grindcore more so than actively enjoying it. You can have too much of a good thing, and that feeling relegates the likes of Barf Bag or Dissolve Me to forgettable moments that perhaps should have been left behind.

But on the whole, it’s hard to really balk at Festering Grotesqueries. At a time when the many facets of metal seem to be trying to outdo itself in the shock stakes, grindcore still reigns as king and DRIPPING DECAY have understood the assignment of protecting its title. If you’re gonna talk the talk, this is the ‘How To’ guide on walking the walk.

Rating: 7/10

Festering Grotesqueries is out now via Satanik Royalty Records.

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