Gorgy—Birth of Damnation
I’m a huge fan of bands that stretch the limits of what metal is ‘supposed’ to be. I love it when bands willfully ignore genre restrictions and incorporate influences from a variety of musical styles. To my mind, bands that look outside the metal realm for inspiration are inherently brave (they risk ridicule and masses of criticism don’t forget). They should be honored for having the balls (or ovaries) for aiming at an ambitious target, even if they miss. That said, sometimes you just want the fucking metal,and—as much as I enjoy the fertile fields of experimentation—I also have a bit of an addiction to bands that happily forgo the idea that you need to experiment at all. I love it when bands simply draw a line in the sand and go on to produce damn fine albums that harness all the attributes of their chosen genre and nothing else.
So, here be Gorgy then. You want the some wicked death metal? You got it. Croaking gurgling vocals—check. Swampy whipping riffs—check. Brutal, confrontational and sacrilegious—check, check and check! Kentucky’s Gorgy have released their debut, Birth Of Damnation, and it is stacked with everything essential for crafting perfectly menacing traditional death metal. Schooled in the Cannibal Corpse, Incantation, Suffocation and Immolation academy, Gorgy’s Kelly McCoy on guitars, Clint Glasscock on drums, Booby Snook on vocals, Jeremy Miller on guitar/vocals and Chris Haynes on bass lay out eight battering tunes that sit squarely in the gruesomely vintage realm.
A multi-member compositional effort, *Birth of Damnation *is staked with gore-soaked lyrics and plenty of interlinking film samples to set the scene. *“Someone chopped to death by chainsaw or drowned in boiling water, throat torn out by a maddened cat, burned alive, tortured, scalded, stabbed,” *begins “Welcoming The Gore”. You get the point. Gorgy are all about taking things back to the cradle (note the devilish album cover), with “3rd Degree Sodomy”, “May Cause Birth Defects” and “Induce The Inutile” being excellent hammering tracks with solid grooves that could have easily been vomited forth in the earlier days of Florida’s sweaty scene. It’s clear having more than a couple of members contributing to the writing is a good thing, I don’t want to suggest there’s anything too varying structure-wise, but the album certainly doesn’t stagnate for all its strict adherence to rudimentary death metal rules.
I’ve been on a real OSDM trip of late and I’ll be adding Gorgy to my growing list of bands from 2011 that have released solid, authentic and killer death metal. As the band themselves say, “it’s just no hype, no filler, bang your head death metal.” So in that regard Gorgy have come up with a totally successful debut. By not overreaching or shooting for the stars they’ve done exactly what they set out to do. Trawling the depths of gore, profanity and disrespect they pull out the cudgel and successfully hammer the nucleus of death metal home.
(Horror Pain Gore Death Productions)
