Aborted Kill You Nostalgically with Retrogore
If you took a shot for every line up change Aborted have gone through, you would almost certainly die of alcohol poisoning. But that death would be nothing compared to how brutal your death would be if Aborted’s ninth studio album could actually kill. Retrogore is absolutely crushing, and is not for the faint of heart — and I really can’t emphasize that enough. Retrogore is heavier than a season premiere of The Biggest Loser, and it’s as good as its album artwork is awesome.
So where do you even start with Retrogore? To be honest, it doesn’t really matter. From the opening track to the closer, this album is completely relentless and unlike anything else I have heard this year. It will have you by the balls and won’t let go until your grandkids’ grandkids can feel its iron grip. Listening to this album is like having your skull pounded by a jack hammer, if having your skull pounded by a jack hammer somehow produced pleasure. If Behemoth and Cannibal Corpse had a baby that played instruments with the heaviness of power tools… well, that’s the kind of sound we’re looking at here.
There are plenty of high points on Retrogore, and very few lows. “Whoremageddon” is incredibly catchy; “Termination Redux,” in addition to having a super brutal and weirdly sexy music video, has some punishing triplets that fans will love moshing their brains out to. It’s one of the most glorious, over-the-top auditory assaults I’ve heard in a long, long time and that makes it delightful. You know, in the dying an agonizing death sort of way.
My one critique of Retrogore is that even though I love how unforgiving and punishing it is, it never relents for even the briefest breather, and by the twelfth track, the album can get a bit grating. I’m not knocking a death metal band for being too heavy — it’s just that when an album plays on eleven for forty minutes straight without turning it down to a ten or a nine for even an instant, you can’t appreciate how intense playing on eleven really is because the intensity becomes homogenous.
That, however, is a minor gripem and should not discourage anyone from checking this album out. Because if there’s one thing that’s for certain, Retrogore is now the album I’m going to use to scare people who have never heard death metal before.
Aborted’s Retrogore drops April 22 via Century Media Records. You can stream the title track here and pre-order it here.
