Review by Carl on December 24, 2025.

Yup, it's that time again. Time to review another one of those pathology-obsessed albums from around the change of the millennium, so throw open a couple of windows to let out the smell of raw meat and formaldehyde, because we're about to get clinical here.

To cut right to the bone, Patologicum is pretty much a Mortician clone. From the mercilessly downtuned chainsaw riffs to the fiercely blasting velocity employed for a generous part of the runtime, we've heard it all before on albums such as "Chainsaw Dismemberment" and "Domain Of Death". You know the drill: short songs that combine raging blasting ferocity with punishing slow stomping parts with way too many horror movie samples in between. The one thing that sets these Polish sicko's apart from Mortician is the fact that the vocals here do not try to ape Will Rahmer's deep vocal rumblings, but instead utilize a kind of vomitous, burping approach more in line with what goregrinders like Regurgitate or Dead Infection spewed upon their audience. Not that this technique makes any of the vocalizations more intelligible, you still can't make out any of it, but it makes for a nice variation in between all the Mortician worship/plagiarism. To complete the picture presented here, the percussion sounds like a drum machine, although there is a drummer credited in the liner notes. I guess electronic pads were used, presumably to mimic the programmed drums on those classic Mortician albums. And it will probably not surprise you that the production here is close to that of albums like the ones mentioned earlier, with the rattling percussion and oozing vocals well up front in the mix, and the fuzzed-out bass and guitars lying over it like a warm blanket. Kinda like Mortician sounded on their recordings, but a bit cheaper, more like the store brand version of it.

High art this ain't, but this is the kind of stuff I personally can't get enough of. It oozes filth and fury while delivering gore and grime all through the runtime of this vile and revolting slice of grinding death, and that is something that gets my motor purring anytime. I'm just a sucker for this type of blunt force death/grind, you know. Despite the production being somewhat on the cheap-ass side and the huge amount of movie snippets getting a bit tiresome towards the end, I'm down with this. Hey, I can stomach these things in the case of Mortician, so it would make me a hypocrite to cause a stink about it in the case of Patologicum, right?

If you like any of the bands mentioned above, you won't be disappointed by this one either. Original it ain't by a long shot, but I said it before and will do here again: as long as Mortician themselves are sitting on their hands when it comes to a new album, a slice of downtuned brutality like Hecatomb Of Aberration will help fill that silent void for the time being.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10