Corrosive - Nourished by Blood

Murder in the every row

Corrosive is most well known for stealing the band name I came up with when I was 12.  But beyond that, they really don't seem to be all that well known at all, releasing a mere three albums across twenty four years, amassing zero reviews on MA.  This is a fucking shame because, if Nourished by Blood is anything to go by, Corrosive is the true heir to the crown Vomitory dropped on their way out of the scene.

So yeah, these Germans rip shit to shreds with alarming regularity on this album.  The wall of sound production creates an explosive element to the already ruinous music, with the nonstop percussionary salvo decimating eardrums at every turn.  This congeals with an absolute whirlwind of tremolo devastation that ultimately creates a monstrous blast of destructive death metal that pretty much instantly hooked me.  Those two sentences pretty much sum up the entire album, because while this is superb in execution, there really isn't any real innovation or anything to cement it as a future classic.  It plays into the tropes of the blast obsessed legends out of Europe like the aforementioned Vomitory, Unleashed, and Vader, but that's not really a problem considering all three of those bands completely fucking smoke.  The lone misstep is probably the weird and gloomy "God Gives" near the end, with an ill-fitting whispered outro and muddy acoustic guitars.  I get what it was going for, but the churning atmosphere doesn't really work.  The band's strength very clearly lies in the other ten tracks (excluding the intro) where they just put the pedal to the floor and mow down a crowd with the head-slicing wall from Caligula. 

There's very little to say about Nourished by Blood really, but I'd say the shallow, one-dimensional approach works extremely well here since they show up with one purpose and execute it nearly flawlessly.  The odd "God Gives", the groovy "War is My Inspiration", and the weird cover of the Ghostbusters theme song are the only thematic breaks from single-minded aural warfare, and even then only two of those three don't really work.  I'm sorry, the Ghostbusters theme is already perfect and adding blasts and growls to it while keeping the main melody intact in its original major key only makes me think of the fucking terrible Crazy Chocobo song from Final Fantasy XIII-2.  For those of you that aren't hopeless dorks, be fucking glad you don't know what that is.


RATING: 81%