Vomitor

An eight-song, 31-minute album of raw, sloppy Australian war metal is generally a very good idea. Vomitor's second disc (coming at us a full eight years after their debut) hits the spot just right, with insanely noisy riffs that are like the craziest of German thrash sped up and played by a drunken black/thrash band. While opener "Crimson Tide" dabbles a bit in the sludgier side of things during its closing, the rest of the song sets the stage for the album nicely: an almost laughable blur of chaotic noise, thrash gone horrible, black gone even more antisocial and death gone way wrong. Songs like "Flesh for Satan" and the surprisingly trad metal-sounding "Saga of the Rage" would sound like amateur demo material if they didn't have that certain something amidst their sloppy blasting. That certain something being the power of the mighty riff, which, surprisingly, is dominant throughout this excellent headache of a disc.