Mass Burial –Vomitory, Primal Massacre

Album number five for the Swedish death metal machine that was Vomitory. Back in the old days of the early 2000s, I would stop at a local record store every single payday. I would get out of work, deposit my check (in the dark ages before we all had Direct Deposit, miracle that that is….) and head to the same store, regardless of where I was working. Maybe I’d put off my trip until I was on my way out for the evening, but regardless: like clockwork, every other Friday took me record shopping. I would walk around this store and look at practically any and every release that even appeared to be metal related. And every single trip would culminate with me buying a stack of new CDs, often times about one hundred dollars’ worth of new music at a time.


 Old stuff, new stuff, bands I’d heard of and had some interest in exploring; bands I’d never heard of but, by some virtue of their appearance – be it their logos or names or label affiliation – decided I had an interest in exploring. Vomitory was one of these bands one Friday afternoon, and I grabbed both Blood Rapture and Primal Massacre. I heard them at the time and was probably suitably impressed, but ultimately both albums faded into the background of my metal listening. Certainly not for any lack of quality on their part, as both were the reasons I started hunting Vomitory down again years later when amassing my digital music library.

Primal Massacre seems to be, at least as far as the guitar sound is concerned, a throwback to Redemption, as the guitars are a lot buzzier and thin sounding compared to the intervening albums Revelation Nausea and Blood Rapture. Not to say this is a bad thing, but there is a pretty noticeable difference in the overall sound. The record generally sounds a little less powerful in terms of production, almost as if the band were recorded from further away; that “microphones down the hall” effect.

One more time, things really kick up a notch with the third song, “Stray Bullet Kill,” and keep going into “Epidemic (Created to Kill)” before slowing down to a bit more of a groove with “Demon’s Divine”. At this point, I think it’s safe to call it a formula: a Vomitory album starts with two solid songs, but doesn’t really grab you until the third comes along. Then, from track three to the end of the experience, you’re in for a good and enjoyable ride. I’m not sure what the deal is here, because none of these first five albums have bad or weak opening tunes, so it’s not like you’d be better off skipping them or anything. They are quality jams well worth the listen, but they are pretty plain compared to the rest of the offering. At first, for the first three albums I thought maybe the indifference toward opening cuts was simply my getting adjusted to the album, each of which had a different vocalist and an ever so slight difference in overall sound, especially with Redemption in the middle. But here, Primal Massacre is the fifth album overall, and the third with quality vocalist Erik Rundqvist, so I shouldn’t need eight minutes of an album to get acclimated, right?

Anyway. “Retaliation” is a real burner of a song, featuring another real catchy riff; penultimate song “Cured Revelations” is also a really good listen; and closer “Chainsaw Surgery” ends with the drum and guitar, “Thank you and Good Night!!!” kind of flourish. The full album clocks in at just over 34 minutes, and again the shorter playing time is really a positive. For as much as I have thoroughly enjoyed may trek through Vomitory, there have not been many instances that I can point to of the band doing anything new or innovative or even different from one album to the next, and the greatest sin a death metal album can perpetrate is to be boring. Vomitory is never boring, although some people may label them generic, but shorter albums are absolutely things working in a bands’ favor when they are trying to keep an audience from realizing, or at least, realizing in a negative way, that they’re running a five album streak of kinda the same album. I know some metal fans would be tearing their hair out after basically a week now of listening to essentially the same album, but for me, as long as the music is good and engaging, I’m usually ok with a lot of the same kind of stuff, so long as I’m not getting bored. 

While this has nothing to do with the music at all, I have to say that I find the cover art irritating. A cool yet typical kind of soul-being-tormented-by-demons-in-an-inescapable-hell scene, the image is rendered in orange with a small amount of yellow, making it hard to really see. From Redemption to this album, cover art has come in the form of basically two tone or two color images: black and blue (Redemption), black and orange (Revelation Nausea), green and red (Blood Rapture). Primal Massacre continues this trend, but makes the worst color choices, to the point that details are barely visible unless you really, really look at it. Death metal as a genre has a rich history of great and detailed cover images, but in this single instance, Vomitory fails to uphold that tradition. I was critical of the sort of goofiness of Redemptions’ cover, and Primal Massacre’s is a better image, but really badly executed. 

But that’s not a terrible thing, right? A bad cover doesn’t spoil the music on the album, right? No. No it does not.