Review by Carl on October 29, 2024.

You know how some bands use progressive elements to sculpt their music, adding subtle nuances and intricate instrumentation to come to a work of art that all critics come to praise as high art? Yeah, well, Contaminated is not that kind of band, because this lot just takes the blunt approach to simply batter the listener senseless.

The death metal that Contaminated plays lands like a metal-plated mace right in the face. In a none-too-subtle manner, the band alternates furious blast-beat jackhammering with pummeling slow sections, with the only intention being to inflict as much damage as possible. The guitars sound like Dismember chainsawing themselves a way through someone's skull, sounding gruff and gritty in that special Boss HM-2 way, while a roaring grizzly bear bellows its approval over the ensuing aural carnage. All of this crushing delight is being underpinned by a nice natural-sounding percussion, performed either with all the sensitivity of a machine gun stuck on automatic, or else with the subtlety of a very angry person slowly hammering a nail into a piece of hardwood. Melody is pretty much absent in this head-on collision of brutish doom metal and down-tuned grindcore frenzy, with the only breathing spaces being some sparse guitar noodling scattered throughout this rough, remorselessly heavy slab of utterly punishing death/doom with an unhealthy amount of grinding insanity injected.

Soundwise, the production pretty much follows suit with the music on offer, keeping everything sounding barbaric and heavy throughout. I will say that for a band as unforgiving as Contaminated, the soundmix is kept surprisingly transparent, with everything neatly balanced out. There isn't really any instrument that takes center stage here, everything flows together in a massive sonic iron fist, ready to plow itself into the tender area without mercy. Honestly, that's a pretty strong effort, because stuff like this can easily deteriorate into a bubbling mush of distortion, but here everything stays coherent and especially vicious for the total duration of the album.

This kind of roaring death metal utilizing doomed-out crawl combined with battering velocity and a gargling, deep death grunt isn't anything out of the ordinary, because there must be a gazillion of these bands walking around, but when this type of metal is brought with as much conviction as Contaminated does here, I'd say to just keep 'em coming. There's always room for jello, but also for heavy-ass, remorselessly intense death metal as well.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10