You can see the red blood and clotted organs flung high and wet in the daylight of the cemetery where the fiend and the defiler alike claw mud and scrape away at the freshly buried coffin snacks they’d hunt. The shrieks come from holes in the lungs where rotted gases escape, spraying wetness and furiously clicking beetles down their tattered bloody clothes. Cars crash around you and your own blood pours over your eyes as day turns to moonlit night and you awake, blurry eyed and hungry for death. Smell nothing, taste nothing, see nothing, because all you’ve left is your ears and towards the slapping thud of meat against car door as primal ecstasy bellows forth a spray of acid puke onto the crowd. They’ve all gathered here today to see the sentient pile awake and crush the crypts with ancient doomed-death so few could conjure. Stringing your bass with your own intestines and tuning by ear all compatriots gather atop a ditch full of bones and too-rotten flesh to witness this half hour of ‘Festering Odes to Deformity’, a cryptic set of three morbid sledges spirited alive through electrocution and great malignant curse. From St. Petersburg, Russia you’ve been resurrected unto diabolical rampage, an outpouring of Caustic Vomit for the ages.

If you were a fucked up dork for most all of the 2000’s like I was you might’ve spent the decade hunkered down ripping through every death metal demo the internet could conjure from the annals of extreme metal history and it’d seem that many tribes would connect worldwide in service to these old, rotten and decaying arts. Old school be worshiped but the constructs be damned, the sound today is defined by filth and doom and above all else a mountain of death and carrion to stink up the night. Caustic Vomit fit in quite well with the Maggot Stomp (Rotted, Abraded, Gutless) sort of fare, the sort of bands that’re beguiling the Blood Harvests (Cavurn, Crematory Stench, Mortiferium) and 20 Buck Spins (Fetid, Ossuarium, Bone Sickness) of today with ancient rotted life that is appealing for its simple filthiness and effective doom n’ punch death metal style a la Autopsy. With a logo that looks like Cemetery‘s (Sweden) and a sound that’d probably scare the pants off an old Gorement tape these Russian fellows clearly know the kind of raw, fucked-up mud they need to bring to stand out. They’re a bit slower than you might expect and when they do crank it you’re getting those punkish undertones thanks to thier love of Mythic and Derkéta and they’re not shy about name-dropping Rippikoulu, Divine Eve and Disembowelment for good measure.

Excited as you may be by those references they’re not necessarily as cleverly arranged as some of those groups, though the love for Rippikoulu‘s 1992 demo is clear (minus the snare sound) as is the simpler jog of Derkéta. The sludgy bellowing of Cavurn and the brutal ‘old school’ presence of Mortiferium are reasonable comparisons and you’d almost think this was a pacific northwest death/doom band if not for their well-contained rehearsal space acoustics. Much as I love the sound and the general pacing of these three ~10 minute songs Caustic Vomit are at their most interesting when they speed up as their slower doom metal riff game isn’t (wasn’t) yet up to the level of a Spectral Voice or Ceremonium demo quite yet. I’d kind of bite my tongue on that during “Once Coffined Memories” but the other two tracks do drag in terms of ideas when things get outwardly sluggish. I understand the effect and the influences they’re going for, and love those too, but this band is just one weird keyboardist (Castle) or extra lead guitarist away from being a true freak that’d stand out in the myriad of old-and-new names I’ve thrown around thus far. I’m still on board if they stick with this sound and style though some measure of weird would really put things over the edge.

No doubt I’m months too late in mentioning this early 2019 limited tape release of this 2018 demo, it sold out incredibly fast back in February… Nonetheless, ‘Festering Odes to Deformity’ has been kicking around in my head ever since and deserves some attention for the love of death/doom metal that isn’t trendy filth that’d recreate ancient methodology fashioned into somewhat memorable and always brutal pieces. Moderately high recommendation. For preview I’d suggest “Once Coffined Memories” as that was my own personal fix for coming back to this tracklist but they’re all effective in representing the demo as a whole.

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