Maybe we're looking at a name that's incredibly cliché—and you'd be right to think so. But just seeing that cover art was enough to trip my circuit breakers and pull me into the curiosity of this album. As you might have guessed, these Spanish kids seem like they were birthed from early ’90s death metal cemeteries, risen once more as flesh-hungry zombies breaking out of their coffins to strike again. Since I’m a sucker for black and white cover art, they score bonus points with me already. But more importantly, Morbid Flesh grabs me from the start with a deranged, bloody, and downright evil drawing that looks like it crawled straight out of the mind of a lunatic. Thoughts that begin with zombies slaughtering people in a crypt quickly evolve into wild fantasies like Impaled Ratzinger—yes, that’s the Pope on a spike.
Expecting something more straightforward and typical in sound, I was surprised to find a band with far more variation than I anticipated. There's very little monotony here. Naturally, you’ll encounter the classic influences—Bolt Thrower, Entombed, Autopsy, Asphyx, Grave, Comecon, and Dismember—but Morbid Flesh channels the more ruthless, savage, and darker side of the Swedish death metal tradition. Each track flows between face-smashing fast tempos and doom-laden slow parts that drip with cemetery-grade atmosphere, switching off like the rising and falling of a necrotic tide.
Sinister sermon-like samples (see Impaled Ratzinger), evil guitar melodies, and long, hypnotic, riff-heavy slow segments (see Beneath the Earth) are among the key elements that make this album work so well. In fact, the section that begins at 2:39 in Beneath the Earth and lasts until the end of the song is enough to make you want to slap yourself and crawl into a bottomless grave.
There’s an abundance of tremolos and earworm riffs, guttural cavernous vocals, and drums that alternate between d-beat grooves and explosive blasts, summoning the cemetery mass straight into your nightmares. On top of that, those long, elastic, and expressive guitar solos show off another strength of the band. The seamless transitions between fast and slow passages, the sharpness and cruelty of the riffs, the classic but perfectly chosen guitar tones, and the integration of melodic allure into the overall brutality all point to a surprisingly successful album. Just listen to the riff assault in Endless Hate—a barrage that grinds down your ears mercilessly.
And for the finale, they included a cover of Death’s Scream Bloody Gore. Even though I’ve never been a huge Death fan, I have to admit—it’s a solid rendition.
Sure, maybe this isn’t the most original album in the world. But in terms of traditional death metal, these guys deliver everything you want—and they might just make you lose your mind in the process. The compositions are excellent, and instead of sinking into monotony, the unexpected bursts of madness throughout the record keep you hooked. The graveyards are calling…