Haemorrhage

Spain's Haemorrhage have decided to puke forth full-length number six, the hilariously titled Hospital Carnage, for gore-grind consumption and subsequent regurgitation. There are no real surprises on this 35-minute album, which is filled with many songs that fall between a-minute-and-a-half and two minutes, burped vocals, hyper-polka beats and dive-bombing guitar solos. Granted, there are a few longer tracks that are more death metal than gore-grind, but for the most part, this is old-school Carcass worship, and despite a production that's a bit flimsier than previous efforts, it sounds great. Opener "Open Heart Butchery" even almost grooves a bit, and there's a nice punk vibe to tunes like "Flesh-Devouring Pandemia." The album is a perfectly executed and very enjoyable high-energy romp through terrain that's familiar but can really only be so, otherwise we end up with another Aborted situation. The end result is the slow dawning upon blood-soaked heads that for it to be good, gore-grind can never change, meaning that as the years go on we're going to get the same album over and over again, which only slightly diminishes the very high value placed upon such platters of splatter by the aforementioned blood-soaked denizens of this gloriously gory underbelly of metal.