Killing Absorption

Killing Absorption is the type of skull-smashing death metal/grindcore album that, back in the late '80s and early '90s, inspired aging Baby Boomer parents to say, "How, in God's name, can my teen-ager listen to this stuff? Whatever happened to real music like Herman's Hermits?" But what goes around comes around — and many of those moshing, grindcore-loving teens from 1988 and 1989 have gone on to become parents themselves. Father Time has a way of turning yesterday's adolescents into today's thirtysomethings, which can — in some cases — mean saying "adios" to pentagrams and mosh pits and hello to minivans, Chuck E. Cheese's (where a kid can be a kid), white picket fences and a mortgage in suburbia. But the good news for grindcore bands is that new generations of rebellious teens will come along and search for albums that parents can't stand — albums like Killing Absorption, which recalls the amelodic assault of early grindcore favorites such as Cannibal Corpse, Carcass and Cancer. This is not the type of release that urges death metal to grow up and show some maturity; the gurgling vocals make the Occult-obsessed lyrics impossible to understand without the lyric sheet, and the whole thing comes across as ironic rather than genuinely disturbing. Although Fleshgore is from Europe — the Ukraine, to be exact — this album is, stylistically, much closer to early American and British death metal than it is to the Scandinavian death metal that followed. Killing Absorption (which was recorded in 2003, self-released in 2004 and reissued by This Dark Reign in 2006) isn't an exact replica of the old Cannibal Corpse/Carcass/Cancer aesthetic — the blastbeats show an awareness of black metal — but all things considered, this 31-minute CD essentially belongs in the grindcore category. Killing Absorption does not pretend to point death metal in any new directions, but if one has a taste for the extreme, it is still a decent, if predictable and limited, recollection of grindcore's good old days.