Review by chrisc7249 on May 16, 2022.

Polluted Inheritance will always have a special place in my heart. They were one of the first death metal bands I discovered thanks to random YouTube (ew) recommendations, and they're the reason I found Metal Archives. That, and I also just really like their music. Though they've never been among the most commercially successful of technical death metal bands, fans of the genre that know their shit are aware of them and most likely enjoy them to some extent. I mean, they're a classic at this point. This album, their debut "Ecocide," was released nearly 30 years ago at the time of writing this. That's a long time, much longer than I've been alive for. This is some of the oldest tech death you'll find and it's damn good.

Obviously, around 1992, there really weren't many bands to stylistically model your sound after. There were only a handful of technical death metal bands and most of them had zero name recognition at the time. Despite this, Polluted Inheritance wears their influences on their sleeves here, with obvious nods to legendary albums such as Death's "Human" and a bit of Atheist's "Piece of Time." This is still very much thrashy tech death that completely focuses on making complex riff sequences rather than noodling like bands tend to do nowadays. Ah, back in the day where the main focus was riffs - don't get me wrong, I obviously love the technical death metal of the modern days, but there's just something so special about these old bands that just focused on making jagged riffs that were still worthy of listening to.

So it should come as no surprise that Polluted Inheritance are really good at writing good riffs. As stated earlier, these riffs are rooted heavily in Human-era Death, heavy and dense but still thrashy in nature. Each song has a basket full of good riffs to throw at you, and it'll keep you headbanging the entire time. The groove is never lost in this album, as each song is both memorable and catchy, and is complemented by fantastic drumming and a thick bass sound - now, this drummer would go on to do much greater things for the next album (spoiler alert), but his performance on here is nothing shy of excellent as he finds the right balance between technicality and rhythm. The bass is also on the same level as the legendary Steve DiGiorgio, though this isn't a fretless bass and he tends to stay within the lines a bit more than Steve did at the time.

The production on here is shockingly clean. I was expecting something much more difficult to listen to when I first delved into it, but was relieved to find out the sound is clean as fuck, but not too stale and overproduced like a lot of bands tend to sound like today. Everything is mixed well and no one thing feels too loud or too quiet. The vocals on this album are perhaps the most intelligible death metal vocals I've ever heard while still being death metal vocals. I'm not sure why more guys don't sound like he does. He managed to actually sound evil and decrepit while also allowing the listener to hear almost everything he says. Rarely does someone find a balance between intelligible and demonic.

Highlights include a bunch of songs. The opener "Faces" is an explosive display of what's about to enter your ears over the course of the next 38 minutes."Eaten" is a quick thrasher guaranteed to melt your face off with it's crushing riffs. And what would the album be like without the trio of "Fear," "Stillborn," and "After Life," the middle of which is the best song on the album in my personal opinion. That's not even touching on other bangers such as "Dissolved" and "Memories of Sadness."

Polluted Inheritance kicked off a solid career with perhaps their best album they ever put out. Their next album "Betrayed" is awesome as well, and perhaps I'll like that one slightly more when I do a deep dive into it, but I've always remembered Ecocide as my favorite one. It's heavy as fuck, very technical for its time, yet still primitive and angry. This is a gem that most death metal fans have either forgotten about or never heard, and it definitely deserves more praise than it's gotten over the last 29 years.

FFO: Death, Atheist, Hellwitch

Favorite song: 'Stillborn'

Rating: 8 out of 10