Vultur – Drowned in Gangrenous Blood

Band: Vultur
Title: Drowned in Gangrenous Blood
Label: Memento Mori
Release Date: 31 October 2019
Country: Greece
Format reviewed: Digital Promo

It was obvious that after ECTOPLASMA, I must offer you VULTUR. For some very important reasons. Hailing from Greece, VULTUR consists of ECTOPLASMA members – George Wolf on the bass guitar and Giannis Grim on the vocals. The other two members of VULTUR are Vasilis Tsafas (Ordeal) on the drums and George on guitars. Next, VULTUR’s new album classically named “Drowned in Gangrenous Blood” is out on the very same day as ECTOPLASMA’s “White-Eyed Trance”. Next, both bands deliver one of the truest, and the finest old school death fucking metal as we know it over the past couple of years. Oh, and by the way, I have 2016 VULTUR’s demo “Vulture’s Beak” on cassette!

What about “Drowned in Gangrenous Blood”? Eight tracks, 37 minutes of pure morbid stink from the pits. I can say it is slightly rawer than ECTOPLASMA’s album, although both bands are into the same alley. In comparison to the band’s debut “Entangled in the Webs of Fear, the album sounds so much more mature, so much more taken care of… so better! Furthermore, again soundwise, “Drowned” is more like Florida OSDM, while “Webs” sounded a bit like an underground Swedish/Dutch production.

Low growling vocals, superb hitting-the-spot riffs, pumping death metal drums with double bass, and heavy bass lines. Now, evoke all the images of rotting flesh, cut legs, bloody bones, smashed heads, surgery room atrocities, and graveyard exhumations. Here you go, welcome to VULTUR’s pit! Well, sounds like the right thing for all the death metal fanatics, doesn’t it?

Since the very first second of the opener “Groans of Excruciating Torture”, the bells toll, all the wolves howling and the sound of a shovel digging, VULTUR invites you to a full moon nightmarish experience in the graveyard pits. It is a death fucking metal at its finest! In “Drowned in Gangrenous Blood” you can hear your own suffocation in blood before the track to explode into atrocious death metal torture hymn. I must say that all that tiny little effects of strengthen the tracks and picture the severe atmosphere. “High on Adrenochrome” begins slowly and torturous, but then it goes into the glorious Benediction realms from their finest times.

To have tracks entitled “Return to Soil”, “Devirginized, Butchered and Eaten” and “Crushing the Ribcage” (awesome tracks!) is not only worth mentioning here but giving high praise when listening too. It is pure heaven, an absolute pleasure for my ears, loving pure uncompromising gore old school death metal. The album finishes with the crushing “Postmortem Lividity” in superb death metal savagery style, only to leave hunger for more gangrenous blood.

“Drowned in Gangrenous Blood” is an album that could be easily put next to all glorious (mostly Florida) death metal classics from the early 90s which were devastating all the righteous innocent souls of the simple listener. It is really a very very strong album, bringing the stink of the rotting meat and soil. I liked a lot the sound production as well as the tiny low solos which appear here and there only to strengthen the horror of the nightmarish experience. Carrying visions of amputated limbs, malignancy and decayed bodies, “Drowned in Gangrnous Blood” is an OSDM celebration! It is definitely among the finest death metal albums in 2019 for me too, as I stated for ECTOPLASMA’s new record. “Drowned in Gangrnous Blood” is an absolute hymn of OSDM morbid pathology! 9/10 Count Vlad