Review Summary: Hospitalcore
The County Medical Examiners are a goregrind band unlike any I've ever known before. This band was made up of medical students (who now have their MD and one of them has a PHD even) who are extreme fans of Carcass. This band was actually created for the sole purpose of bringing the sound of Carcass back to life when they had been all but left behind. When the band first started out, they had recruited Michelle Hayes to play bass for them. To be perfectly honest I’m rather turned on at the idea of a female goregrinder, but after the band’s first full-length album,
Forensic Fugues and Medicolegal Medleys she left to continue her studies. 60 year old Dr. Guy Radcliffe was brought into the band even though he’s never listened to Carcass or grind/ death in general ever. In fact, the only experience he has with the bass was back in his days of the blues and jazz. Yet when the group's second output
Olidious Operettas is released, you can see the band making yet another formidable grind recording. There isn’t much to complain about here, it really is a solid reincarnation of the old school Carcass sound we all used to love.
Everything about the band’s music has to scream “old school Carcass, old school death, grind at its roots”, and let me be the first to say they really do succeed. The production fits ever so nicely, even for an album released in 2007. The fact that this group has managed to recreate that old school raw sound really is incredible, and it’s a highlight for the album. The guitar riffs aren’t soggy, nor are they obnoxious or boring by any means. The first track “Casper’s Dictum” shows this. The drums also sound pretty nice; they’re not way overproduced either. And on top of that, they’re played really well, the drum lines aren’t littered with repetitive and annoying blast beats, and the kick isn’t so loud it blocks all other sound out. The composure of this album is pretty much exactly like Carcass handled it back in the day.
As the album progresses, some minor flaws in the bands songwriting become noticeable, and don’t exactly add up. The vocals are probably the most blatant example of this. Both ends of the vocals don’t quite match up to what they should. The pitch shifting works very well, but the traditional goregrind gutturals aren’t too solid, and they certainly aren’t as all over the place as they were in
Reek of Putrefaction. And the higher pitched vocals are bit echo-y, or hollow, therefore making their goregrind sound a bit soggy, unlike the band they split with, General Surgery, who has a very solid vocal performance but lacks guitar proficiency. If you’ve heard any of General Surgery’s work, just imagine an opposite realm of goregrind for The County Medical Examiners, and that’s basically what you can expect to find here. This album works, just in different ways.
As hard as the band attempted to bring the life of old school grind back into the world by recording these tracks, advertising is an issue. The band has a rather profound reputation of not playing any live shows, and using pseudonyms to hide their true identity in the work place, because apparently a hospital couldn’t handle the idea of their workers playing this kind of stuff. So the band is pretty much obscured to the world, so this reinvention is pretty much known only to them, which is too bad, because every fan of grind should have the privilege of knowing this. For those of you who are actually turned off by the incredibly low and gurgling vocals of true goregrind, then this might actually be right up your alley; But if you’re like me, and you want the vocals as solid and low-pitched as humanly possible, (ok, not pornogrind-low, but still), then the vocals here might not appeal to you too much. However the reinvention of old school Carcass is still a cool undertaking, and they did a fantastic job with what they had, and for that, we take our hats off to you, doctor.
Fun Fact: The disk for this album is a scratch-and-sniff, and it smells like rotting shit queef turd :D
