TEN FROM THE TOMB is a weekly feature in the form of a themed list devoted to grouping together albums of similar interest that I missed throughout the year. These albums were overlooked for review for any number of reasons with the most common reason being constraints of time. I have a policy of covering 99% of everything I receive in some form, be it mini-review or full-feature, so don’t hesitate to send anything and everything my way.

Here I present a ten album sampler of some brutal death metal and/or brutal deathgrind relevant releases I’ve so far overlooked this year. Consider it a soundtrack to your weekend spent trying to find a comfortable position to hyperventilate through your gas mask  while bath salts and krokodil obsessed cannibal zombies pile unwanted heaps of flesh (mostly Xanax themed SoundCloud rappers, oddly enough) in your backyard. You will die in fear, but you won’t die to the sound of a barbiturate addicted twerp flexing. Most of these albums made it here to Ten From the Tomb because I couldn’t manage the time for a long-form review or because I really didn’t have more than a paragraph or two’s worth of insight beyond banal description. If you don’t like brutal death metal, relax! This’ll be back every seven days with 10 more albums from different styles, genres, themes, etc.

Hey! Don’t dive in thinking this will all be chuggin’, thuggin’ and gore-burping putridity. I generally skipped over the truly gimmicky shit and tried to find releases that at least mange a damn good groove. I post a poll on Patreon every two weeks so that Patrons can pick between genre/concepts as I dig through hundreds of not-yet-reviewed releases. This isn’t so much a collection of dregs and flops but rather a selection meant to convey diversity within underground brutal death metal music’s sphere of influence, keep in mind I’m not at all a brutal death metal expert beyond like 2005 and I don’t regularly listen to it. Think my opinions are trash and that I suck? Want to totally tell me off, bro? Click away and let’s all live more sensible lives full of meaningful interactions. I’m too old and bored with people to care.

Artist	Aborted Fetus
Title [Type/Year]	The Ancient Spirits of Decay [Full-length/2018]
Rating [2.5/5.0]	BUY/LISTEN on Bandcamp!

This Perm, Russia brutal death metal band have been at it since 2000 and have been steadily releasing full-lengths since 2008. This sixth full-length comes incredibly soon after their ‘The Art of Violent Torture’ (2017) and I’m guessing that is mostly due to a three year hiatus between post ‘Private Judgement Day’ (2014). One of the main reasons I don’t often review brutal death metal is that it resembles tough guy/beatdown hardcore in the sense that bands rely and iterate on a certain clique of sounds… This isn’t really a problem per se, rather it is just stale groove/death at the end of the day and when bands do experiment they tend to plagiarize each other heavily. Aborted Fetus are here to groove, to blast, and to hammer their torture themed lyrics down your throat. They are pure early 2000’s style brutal death a la Severe Torture for the most part but they relent and ease into some Cannibal Corpse style fare that is typical of man Russian bands. I actually like the rawness of the album and they’ve left in a few mistakes that sound very organic and unhinged at times.

Artist	Disowning
Title [Type/Year]	Battle of Neverness [EP/2018]
Rating [3.0/5.0]	BUY/LISTEN on Bandcamp!

This is essentially a teaser single for French/Canada based brutal death metal project Disowning and their upcoming full-length. The first song “Battle of Neverness” is taken from their album and the rest is an unreleased 2015 demo. A free download, this is mostly worth getting for the demo tracks which offer fairly straight-forward brutal death with some hints of progressive elements. I really appreciated the movements between brutal blasting and slow, brooding heaviness. Modern French death metal tends to be immaculately performed and technically sound and Disowning is no different. The new song reminds me of Kronos with some Morbid Angel and Hate Eternal influences but the demo tracks offer a slightly different sound. If the only goal of the EP was to generate interest in Disowning‘s new full-length, I’d say it worked.

Artist	Vomitile
Title [Type/Year]	Pure Eternal Hate [Full-length/2018]
Rating [3.25/5.0]	BUY/LISTEN on Bandcamp!

There is some merit in arguing against a pure brutal death metal tag for Vomitile‘s third album as this Nicosia, Cyprus based group use elements of groove and thrash in their fairly technical take on death metal. It reminds me of Psycroptic and Vader at times as well as the transitional stuff from Decapitated. ‘Pure Eternal Hate’ ended up being the type of record that comes and goes without leaving a huge mark and this is largely due to it’s fairly standard style of riffing that manages a good groove (“Pestilation”) but ultimately sounds like a lot of the death metal I’d gotten burnt out on in the mid 2000’s. If you really love that era of bands like Malevolent Creation and Vomitory with some extra thrashing thrown in, this should be a great find. For my taste it fell short of something special.

Artist	Flesh Hoarder
Title [Type/Year]	Homicidal Necrophile [Full-length/2018]
Rating [2.75/5.0]	BUY/LISTEN on Bandcamp!

Oh man, this album takes me back to the days of giggling at Brodequin‘s drum sound and videos of two guys moshing alone at a Devourment show on YouTube. If brutal death metal has a ‘true’ legion no doubt Flesh Hoarder are a gem for their orthodoxy and sheer brutality. You should immediately pick up on the Ingested and Disgorge influences but probably won’t find a ton else to get excited about. It is just good old fashioned brutal death metal, but not the 90’s stuff the 00’s stuff that could really drop a breakdown before slam-dancing and deathcore riffs kick-flipped this style in the wrong direction. Primitive and deadly stuff.

Artist	Blight House
Title [Type/Year]	Summer Camp Sex Party Massacre [Full-length/2018]
Rating [3.0/5.0]	BUY/LISTEN on Bandcamp!

Spawned from self-quarantined delirium and manifesting as a never ending fever dream ‘Summer Camp Sex Party Massacre’ is only the latest offense extruded from Rhode Island’s Blight House. It’s howling deathly mush of slammed grindcore resolves as a meaty paste of awkward and hellish death metal music. Wretched, violently-crapped bedroom bilge meets hardcore grooves and British grind/death influences for a blasting shitbeast of an album; I’m honestly not knocking the thing, it is fabulously stupid and disturbing. I will never get tired of the sort of samples that folks put into this type of music and only wish they’d have gone a different route with the drums so that they didn’t sound like bad early 00’s industrial black metal.

Artist	Hate Diplomacy
Title [Type/Year]	Rant [Full-length/2018]
Rating [2.75/5.0]	BUY/LISTEN on Bandcamp!

Heads up, I don’t know shit about deathcore outside of that hilarious Cryptopsy album. ‘Rant’ is the debut from this mix of brutal death metal, deathcore, and beatdown hardcore from Hate Diplomacy. Having formed the project in 2006 musician Dimas Méndez would eventually recruit members of Dehumanized, Fit For an Autopsy after moving to New York in 2015. From there the line-up would solidify in 2016 with members of Waking the Cadaver, Necropia, Eye of the Destroyer and Dehumanized rounding out the crew that’d perform on ‘Rant’. The album itself is exactly what you might expect as a blasting, chugging, metalcore style take on brutal death metal and slam. The vocals are kinda over the top for my taste but the album does a great job of marrying slam with beatdown hardcore. I really got a kick out of how crazed and brutal Hate Diplomacy are but I found the album was a bumpy ride with several uneven moments. Can’t deny the inhaled grunts and pig-belching stamina, though.

Artist	Skinned
Title [Type/Year]	Shadow Syndicate [Full-length/2018]
Rating [3.5/5.0]	BUY/LISTEN on Bandcamp!

Colorado brutal death metal band Skinned have been perfecting their modern take on the genre since their (arguable) breakthrough album ‘Isolating the Gene’ (2012) where higher concept and new sound melded the brutal grind of Origin and the relentless experimental black/death/grind of Benighted into one chaotic extreme metal blast. They toy with atmospheric metal elements on ‘Shadow Syndicate’ even more than they did on ‘Create Malevolence’ (2015) and this includes more Gojira influence and less of the manic Cephalic Carnage style grinding. I was expecting to hate this but I actually warmed up to this band’s sound and it was nice to see they completely cleaned up the terrible production of the previous album. I think the guitarist was kind of out of ideas by the sixth track, but it is probably the most memorable release on this list.

Artist	Exocrine
Title [Type/Year]	Molten Giant [Full-length/2018]
Rating [3.25/5.0]	BUY/LISTEN on Bandcamp!

Well, I’d run out of purely brutal death metal stuff to list and I wanted to mention this latest release from Unique Leader Records artists Exocrine. These French progressive, technical brutalists achieve a science-fiction level of intricacy and speed on ‘Molten Giant’ and they manage to do so without it all feeling like a tunnel of prog metal showmanship. They don’t slow down often enough to really kick into anything truly memorable but I have had this in rotation for about a week and have enjoyed both it’s spectacle and savage delivery. Doesn’t quite shove Obscura out of my periphery but comes close.

Artist	Heaving Earth
Title [Type/Year]	Diabolic Prophecies [Compilation/2018]
Rating [3.75/5.0]	BUY on Eclectic Productions Website!

The first Heaving Earth album was a brutal take on the post-‘Formulas Fatals to the Flesh’ era of Morbid Angel that served as a different path from the similarly inspired early 2000’s Diabolic. ‘Diabolic Prophecies’ hasn’t seen larger release since 2010 but it has been reissued by a small independent Russian label with the band’s first demo as bonus tracks. The main reason I did not review this was due to the promo copy skipping, also I already own this personally… and I always get frustrated reviewing something that readers cannot preview or buy worldwide. I would recommend tracking this album down in general if you’ve never heard it as it offers a satisfying and brutal take on the Ancient Ones’ rhythms.

Artist	Deracinated
Title [Type/Year]	Adoration of Decaying Carrion [Full-length/2018]
Rating [3.0/5.0]	BUY/LISTEN on Bandcamp!

Say what you will about the over the top elevation of modern brutal death metal but there is something to be said for looking at what kids are capable of in 2018 versus 2001 when a bad Suffocation clone could sell out a good sized club without playing a single guitar solo. Deracinated is a collaboration between Russian musician/multi-instrumentalist Alexandr Kubiashvili (Abominable Putridity) and vocalist Ruben Guerra (Seraphic Enthronement, Merciless Torture); Together they create a violent, belching storm of gory brutal death that owes as much to modern slam as it does to Devourment. It isn’t as dumb and chuggy as stuff like Cephalotripsy, and the sound is sharp enough that the spectacle Deracinated creates is almost more entertaining than a lot of technical stuff I come across.

Did I miss your favorite 2018 brutal death metal album? I’d like to know if there are any 2018 releases you loved but didn’t get enough recognition. Drop me a line to tell me! It is always worthwhile to speak up for the lesser known stuff. Please remember you can contribute to my Patreon @ only $1 USD per month ($12 a year) to help keep me in front of the computer writing about metal. Thanks.