Pustulent Flesh Gurgling Pustulence Review
Pustulent Flesh
Gurgling Pustulence
Extremely Rotten Productions
2025
We find ourselves back in the saddle with a grimy, angry and absolutely vicious debut offering from Copenhagen’s Pustulent Flesh. Strap in, this one is gonna be a blistering, bloody ride into the nether realm.
Formed in 2022 and later rounding out their sound with a twin guitar attack, Pustulent Flesh, if the name isn't an obvious indicator, play a filthy, loud and raw style of death metal bordering on grind. We get just seven songs here but my God, they make’em count. In the short run time, all the usual suspects of the styles they embrace are employed from fast blasting to groove laden doom riffs and the HM-2: buzzsaw sound that a little Swedish band called Entombed made famous eons ago.
This is primal and very old school in sound. It's refreshing to hear today, where most death metal even of this variety, is concerned with crystal clear production and quantized and sterile tones. You ain't gonna find that here, not by a long shot. From their press release, “the EP was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Benjamin “Polle” Radtleff at Radtleff Recordings, who captured the band’s raw and putrid expression with sharp precision and maximum foulness.” All the instruments are feedback ridden and carry plenty of muck, and sound like they were taken directly from the recording studio floor. Throughout the songs we are also treated to tried and true (and often overused) horror movie samples, but thankfully they are peppered in sparingly and meant to act as an enhancement to certain movements in the songs. I must mention the vocals here too, as they literally resemble a fire breathing, vomitous demon straight from the pits of Hades, if albeit a bit buried for my liking. Given the genre, perhaps that is their intention? Either way, I’d dig hearing them a bit more present in the mix next time fellas.
I'm not sure what songs I would pick as standouts as again, this thing flies by and leaves you beaten, battered and bruised before you can even catch a breath. However, the lead off track “Beyond Lobotomy”, the plodding breakdown riddled “Cadaver Creation” and the hulking mid-paced violence/sludge metal of “March of the Ravenous Dead” are all perfect places to start (they're the first 3 tracks respectively) and the closing title track is atmospherically eerie, brutality.
Pustulent Flesh isn’t here for a long time, but they are here for a good time. If YOUR idea of a good time is vile, putrid, bone cracking Danish death metal that resides in the same murky graveyard as early Carcass, Blood Duster and the gore obsessed offerings of Exhumed, then put your decaying party hat on and keep rotting in the free world with this motherfucker of an EP.
~TB