This is pretty much the perfect example of the okayest album ever. Necrotombs is the solo project of Xerberus, currently the bassist of Stigmhate and the ex-bassist of several other bands you've never heard of. His second album here, Embalmed with Rotten Flesh is perfectly serviceable and by no means bad in any way, but it's also completely unremarkable and completely not worth listening to.
That's pretty much all there is to say about it, which is sad because that's only three sentences and two of them barely have anything to do with the music itself. It's just that there's so little here worth commenting on. This is orthodox death metal with no new ideas executed perfectly competently. I can't really give a whole lot of praise to any particular aspect of it. There are moments of interest here and there, like the heightened thrash influence of "Born from a Corpse", the back of of "Emptiness of Solitude" where the vocals break from the traditional deep death metal growls and switch to an insanely loud yell, there's the relentlessly heavy grooves of "Frozen to Be Eaten", but all of those moments are barely more interesting than the moments surrounding them and even so they're not particularly great. If there's anything that might sum up what this album sounds like, it's that it sounds like everything and nothing at the same time. The first time I ran through this, I got a lot of Cannibal Corpse vibes, the second time I realized I was mistaken and it was actually much more akin to Entombed, then the third I was convinced it was more early Pestilence I was hearing, then the fourth I realized all of those were wrong and it was actually Autopsy, and then et cetera forever. This isn't because Necrotombs takes the best elements from all the best classic bands and utilizes them all in a way that's so seamless that it sounds like something else entirely. No, this is because this album is so fucking bland and faceless that it can sound like whatever you want it to sound like depending on where your mind is at at any given time.
There's nothing to talk about here. This is regular ass death metal with no defining features and no excitement. The riffs are all bog-standard entry level thrashy death metal with Obituary styled stomps, the drums hit all the usual beats you'd expect for a band of this type (though they're not particularly blast heavy, though that could be because Xerberus simply isn't a drummer), the vocals have a throaty van Drunen approach, and hey this all sounds great on paper but in practice it's just wholly forgettable. If anything, the one thing that truly stands out as different are the two instrumental tracks, which are significantly longer than the rest of the songs and contain riffs that could've easily gone on the rest of the songs without anybody noticing. They don't feel like songs that are instrumental for any artistic reason, or like these riffs were written with that express purpose, or like these songs were finished but so unconventional that vocals just wouldn't fit anywhere. Nah, they just sound like collections of riffs that the dude didn't know what to do with so he just hucked 'em all together with no vocal track and called it a day. There's just no reason to listen to this, competent as it may be.
RATING: 50%
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