Cryptopsy - Blasphemy Made Flesh (1994)^{Release ID: 557}

Great, punishing death metal let down by a crappy production.

Cryptopsy's debut album is a difficult beast to review. On the one hand, it contains truly awesome, technical and brutal death metal that while perhaps not as amazing as on second album None So Vile, certainly crushes a lot of the competition out there. On the other hand, the production is severely lacking, with certain instruments (i.e. the guitars) totally overshadowed by the drums and bass. The drumming is fantastic and so it's such a shame that it sounds like someone clattering on some garbage bins down in the alley. The vocals too are not always fantastic, with just about every vomitous (I think I made that up) word sounding identical to every other one. The screams are certainly impressive, and Lord Worm's lyric sheet may be filled with poetic meanderings into the darker side of humanity, but I think he pretty much ignored them entirely when spewing out these indecipherable monstrosities.

So, the question is, does Blasphemy Made Flesh offer enough to overcome these discrepancies to make it worth it's while? I think the answer is yes, but I'll always wonder how good an album it would have been with the production it deserves. It must be said that the musicianship is frickin excellent despite the recording and that also includes the fantastic leads that pop up irregularly. When the drumming slows down, you will find a multitude of memorable riffs that are just screaming out to be heard. It's hard to pick highlights, but I do find the first half of the album to be better than the second, with tracks like Defenestration, Abigor and Serial Messiah being among the best. The second half is not terrible by any stretch, but perhaps not as memorable, and the sound starts to grate on me after a while. All up, I think Cryptopsy had the bare bones of something truly blasphemous and wonderfully monstrous with Blasphemy Made Flesh, but I don't think they really managed to add the flesh to the bones until they unleashed None So Vile in all its glory.

Canadian brutal death metal outfit Cryptopsy popped up at the perfect time to grab my interest as I'd become totally infatuated with the more extreme end of death metal through Suffocation, Cannibal Corpse & the like a couple of years earlier & was completely obsessed with tape trading so when their 1993 "Ungentle Exhumation" demo tape made its way into my eager hands shortly after release I really wanted to like it. I think I managed to convince myself that I did too as I'd never heard blast beats that possessed the speed & fury of Flo Mounier's & the sheer insanity of Lord Worm's vocals were nothing short of hilarious. I guess you could say that it held far more novelty value than it did substance & the same can be said for their 1994 debut album "Blasphemy Made Flesh" which contains mostly the same material.

"Blasphemy Made Flesh" has gone on to become somewhat of an underground classic over the years but I feel that this is largely off the back of the band's sophomore album "None So Vile" as it really isn't terribly special when you examine it closely with a number of obvious flaws being hard to overlook. Despite what people might tell you, I'd suggest that it's sound possesses just as much old-school death metal as it does blasting brutal death metal. It's just the ultra-fast blast beats & stupidly gutteral vocal delivery that see it so unanimously slated as the most brutal of the brutal. There's definitely a strong deathgrind influence to some of it too actually. The production is often criticized & rightly so but it's not the fuzzy rhythm guitar sound that annoys me as that was pretty common at the time. The things that I struggle with are the poppy bass guitar sound which is too high is the mix & stands out too obviously over the top of the guitars & the heavily reverbed & quite pingy snare sound that's really hard not to obsess over given the amount of times that Mounier is capable of hitting it per second. Plus, Lord Worm makes no attempt whatsoever to enunciate words, instead choosing to act like a drunken fan who has grabbed the mike but has no understanding of the lyrics. Are there some good riffs here? Sure there are (particularly during the half-time sections where Mounier goes double-time on his ride cymbal) but the reality is that this style of death metal can be done so much better than this. The melodic guitar solos seem almost a touch TOO melodic in the context of Cryptopsy's sound & Flo needed to lay off those bouncy 1-2 beats he had a habit of turning to once or twice every track too. Admittedly Flo doesn't over-extend the human ability for speed as often as he does on "None So Vile" where you can obviously hear his endurance failing at the end of the faster blast beats sections which was something that really annoyed me about that record at times.

Ultimately I just think that once the novelty factor wears off there's not a lot of meat on these bones & I don't actually find myself getting all that much enjoyment out of the experience these days even though I can definitely see why an 18 year-old me would have got into it. "None So Vile" was a much stronger & more mature record but I can't say that I can understand the unbridled obsession that fans seem to have with it either. Never mind... I'll always have my beloved Suffocation.

For fans of Wormed, Dying Fetus & "Human Waste"-era Suffocation.

P.S. Please be advised that (despite the common tendency to incorrectly label Cryptopsy's first two albums as technical death metal) there's nothing technical about this record whatsoever.