Review by Michael on September 5, 2023.

After a pretty good EP the band released last year Rotten Casket are now back with their first full-length album called Zombicron. Kicking off with some spooky keyboard tunes reminding of some old horror movies we soon get delivered old-school death metal with some pretty punkish drum parts. Vocalist Martin van Drunen with his unmistakable organ and his bandmates don't miss out on anything and don't deliver us any surprises on Zombicron.

I would describe it as a mixture of (of course) Asphyx with some Swedish death metal influences and it appears as if the guys listened mostly to the second and third Dismember albums which you can clearly find out in songs like 'The Human Farm' or 'The Deadless Adversary'. Within these songs there is a lot of groove and catchy melodies but the Dutch-German band also can throttle down the tempo and perform more death-doomy stuff we all know from Asphyx. Good example here would be 'Le Maitre De Cerceuil' which is more like a crawler slowly creeping towards you and steamrolling everything in its way. Songs like 'The Crystal Deth' or 'Cape Cadaveral' have a lot more steam and are much rawer and brutal and show the aforementioned punkish side of death metal, especially when it comes to the drumming. Talking about 'Cape Cadaveral' the song has a very interesting writing with many breaks and some amazing riffs that make this one a very diverse piece and one of my highlights of the record. Apart from this I would like to know how long Martin van Drunen can “sing” this way? I'm guessing until his lungs are totally empty and throat completely worn out. What he does in this song is really crazy.

With 'Necrolympics' Rotten Casket have a hot contender for the best song title in 2023, Olympic Summer Games Paris 24, here we go! I can clearly see in my mind how some zombies do a decathlon (deathcathlon?) to that song. First a little bit slow because of the rotten bones and putrid flesh soon they become more alive (okay, that's maybe the wrong term) and speed up. Maybe the guys during the songwriting were a little bit inspired by the German national soccer team here? Hm, but maybe not because these guys don't ever get their asses up in 90 minutes to get a good result. One should replace them through some zombies….

Well, just to resume all this to some significance, with Zombicron the band has released a very good death metal album which everybody who likes Asphyx and similar bands will like. The production is pretty tight and the performance of the five musicians is really good. But this was to be expected if you consider the main bands of the guys.
So get the album and the Necrolympics begin!

Rating: 8.7 out of 10