Three way splits have never really been on my good side, I find them void and merely promotional (maybe that’s the whole point of splits), with that said this split found his way into my playlist for the merely rarity of the bands involved, a Paraguayan, Peruvian and Argentinean band are here, before this album I already had the pleasure of hearing Anal Vomit, kick ass band by the way, but had never before heard the other two, so I was intrigued mainly by Funeral from Paraguay, until yesterday I had never heard a metal band from this South American country.
Let’s go by segments:
Anal Vomit: their 7 song segment is nothing like the sound displayed in “Demoniac Flagellations”, of course this split was released 5 years before their first full length album; this songs are more into a raw mid tempo death metal than anything else, there are some moments in which they let loose and speed things up, but the almost Obituary formula is use at least on the first three songs, nothing spectacular, perhaps the inclusion of keyboards in “Rotten Vomit” will sound to you quite bad and childish.
The Peruvians do speed things up and change the mood right after “Rotten Vomit”, and with “Escaping” the band seems to finally wake up and embrace the brutality I love so much; the bass in “Ripping Corpses” is heavily accentuated and takes the front stage with chunks of heaviness and a nice ability, nothing progressive just plain good bass lines. “Kingdom of the Cruelty” is a nice death thrash song that does resemble “Demoniac Flagellations” of course that could be because in their full length you can also find a track called “Kingdom of the Cruelty II”. Anal Vomit’s segment = 6, because the songs are somehow monotonous and they seem to use too many ridiculous backgrounds and atmospheres.
Carnarium: Melodic black metal, a nice change of pace, terrible female vocals, I still don’t know why so many Latin bands think they can just put some girl to sing and it’s going to sound cool, well it’s not damn it!!! You just end up sounding amateur and desperate for some artistic recognition. Ok so their guitars are melodic and catchy, they are good, but like I was saying they try to place too many elements they don’t master yet, so they end up clouding the other areas in which they are good, like a great drummer, and a nice song development, they create a fog of stinky amateurism by placing bad male and female clean vocals, and to add to their disgrace the production doesn’t help at all, making them sound ridiculous. Carnarium has quite a solid song base, the problem comes when they try to embellished the songs, their melodic black is great, if they could just leave out all the unnecessary gadgets their participation would have been more substantial; best track “Al sueño puro” even with the fairy sounds placed in it. 6.5
Funeral: Bad production affected this bad, not enough thou, they are pretty fucking good, death fucking metal!!!, the best band on this split no doubt, they are heavy, intricate, catchy and with sparks of progressives, mostly on the bass; like I said the production is pretty bad, but the songs are good enough for you to forget the production factor. There are ragging solos, great growls and a great bass player (yes this guy is very good) they get an 8.5 inspite of a shitty production and two horribly recorded live tracks.
