Review by Carl on July 6, 2023.

With an excellent band name and an album cover that seems to depict a cannibal walking buffet, this caught my attention alright. That it was released on Extremely Rotten Productions also helped, so here we are, about to vent an opinion that nobody asked about, but which I will provide nonetheless. You're welcome.

Seep deals in a putrid sort of death metal that places heavy emphasis on slow lurching parts, with deep gutturals and heavy distorted riffing, kinda like Autopsy deciding to try their hand at brutal death metal. Doomed-out passages are interspersed with somewhat more uptempo parts to create a gruesome atmosphere of unnamed impending dread about to come down. Faster parts are thrown into the mix occasionally, providing some needed variation from the sickly suffocation of the dirging parts, although they never last long. It is an approach that actually works very well in the big picture, making the menacing slow sections even that more harrowing. And while the names of Mortician, Necrophagia and early Pungent Stench came to mind at times, with Seep borrowing elements from all these acts, it never sounds like a copy. On top of all this there is made room for weird guitar sounds and some well-placed keyboard ambiance here and there, adding an even more uneasy angle to the diseased death metal on offer. It is a formula that certainly works, and you could place Seep between other likeminded acts like Sanguisugabogg and Fluids, who also deal in unsettling downtuned unpleasantness.

While the music is a cool dose of enjoyable repugnant death metal, there are a couple of things that I want to address, and first is the naff drum computer that knocks the balls out of the whole somewhat. The overall heaviness makes up for this, but a percussionist of flesh and blood would certainly be a good addition to the grimy death metal of Seep. As a second, to my liking there are a tad too much spoken parts on here. This is purely a personal thing, but it is something that seldom adds anything of worth to an album in my opinion. Apart from these two points, a solid death metal release without doubt!

In essence, Seep is an old school death metal band in the vein of those mentioned before, but seen through a (Mortician-like) brutal death metal lens. In recent years there have surfaced more bands doing something similar, and Seep are certainly a more than worthy addition to the ranks.

All into squalid, heavy and putrid death metal, take heed!!

Rating: 7.5 out of 10