The Grotesquery - Tales of the Coffin Born

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Goddamn, what a brutal album! Vocalist Kam Lee (Massacre, Denial Fiend, Death, Mantis) and guitarist Rogga Johansson (Paganizer, Demiurg, Ribspreader, Deranged, Edge of Sanity) have teamed up for this death metal project with a specific goal: to create a concept death metal album based on the stories of H.P. Lovecraft's "Macabre Tales" and ghost stories and poems by Edgar Allen Poe and Ambrose Beirce. The result is a punishing slab of nasty, 90's style death metal, each song telling a story about a dude who cuts a baby out of his dead wife's womb after she's been a corpse for three days and the fucked up mutant kid with a lust for blood that the baby grows into (the band's website tells the whole story if you want to read it). The vocals consist of earth shattering bellows of mostly intelligible lyrics. They remind me a little of Barney from Napalm Death but with a little more of a growl. The guitar tone is nasty and totally gut wrenching, churning out mean and crunchy riffs through the entire album. And let's not forget the rhythm section. The bass is very audible, yet unintrusive, with bass lines that are busy without being showy. The drummmer hits hard and, when he's not coming up with tight, awesome fills, he's keeping the beat with a fierce intensity that just crushes your skull.

Each song opens with the voice of the father telling part of the story with a strange sort of warping, tone altering effect on his voice. The lyrics of the song that follows act out the story, so to speak. The cool thing about this album is that the music also tells the story in a way. The mood of each song fits the part of the story it is about very well, as in one of my favorite tracks, This Morbid Child, which is about Matthew, the mutant kid. You see, this boy, Mathew, is a brutal, fucked up fiend and to epmhasize that fact, the closing riffs of this song just annihilate everything with their chugging madness backed by thundering double bass. Another stand out tune is Necromantic Ways, a slow and dark song about the father contemplating what he has done after he conjures up slithering monsters using the Necronomicon. And if I heard the creepy, note-by-note riff on the closing track, Fall of the House of Grotesque, in the middle of the night, I might well pee my pants.  I could go on and on to basically say that, from start to finish, this record is dynamic and heavy with superb production and raw power. I'm finding it hard to continue this review without just repeating the words "brutal", "dark", and "heavy" a thousand times. I haven't been this pleased about a new band in a really long time and I'm hard pressed to say anything negative about The Grotesquery. Their songs are never boring, the story is creepy and pretty cool... Tales of the Coffin Born is just a really great record of awesome death metal.

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