With the recent release of Cemetery Urn's new album The Conquered Are Burned, I thought it would be appropriate to thoroughly listen to and review their 2007 homage to classic Death Metal: Urn of Blood. Relatively unknown compared to bands in the Technical Death and Deathcore trends of late, Australia's Cemetery Urn play a thrashy style of Death Metal that takes quite a few cues from the days of old. The production is gritty, dirty, and raw but surprisingly balanced and well-mixed, reminding me of a more up-to-date Autopsy sound. The bass and rhythm guitars are devastatingly heavy and disgustingly filthy, providing a near constant muddy and evil low-end of simplistic, catchy riffs and patterns. The leads and solos are higher and more technical; melodic albeit twisted much like the brutal Thrash Metal of yesteryear.

Honed down to an ideal Death Metal album length of a mere thirty-one minutes, Urn of Blood manages to cram a modest number of ideas in without repeating itself too often, whilst simultaneously being on the good side of the cusp of sensory deafness, wherein songs begin to blend together into a mass of frantic drumming, strumming, and grunting. In a way the album is loosely structured like one of the grandpappies of Death Metal: Reign In Blood. The first and last songs, Forging Deviant Beasts and Only Remnants of Blood Remain respectively, are quite memorable with sinister melodies and infectious headbanging rhythms, especially on the latter. The middle of the album, particularly after the doom-flavored, grotesque, gore-metal laden Legion of Fiends, is a rip-roaring ride of alternating speedy tremolo-picking and crushingly heavy slow sections spiced with wailing Thrash Metal solos. That's not to say the bulk of album is without hooks; The Urn of Blood has a foreboding intro followed by huge, marching riffs and grand drum fills which soon speeds up to blast-tastic levels of intensity. No, every song has much in the way of memorabilia to take away after your disc has stopped spinning, however I do believe they don't quite match the level of Forging Deviant Beasts, Legion of Fiends, and Only Remnants of Blood Remain.

The vocals aren't quite as prevalent as you might think, often disappearing for great lengths to let the fantastic guitars and drums take over (sadly the bass is not often heard and mostly follows the rhythm guitar). When they are prevalent, they take the form of a rather unique, echoey sounding raspy growl. The best comparison I can make is that it is similar in style to Beherit's vocals, but more competent, powerful, and not nearly as silly. In the atmospheric areas of the album such as Destroyer of Worlds and the aforementioned The Urn of Blood, the vocals take on a demonic, preposterously low quality that was no doubt digitally-aided. Occasionally you will hear gore-metal-esque gurgles and other such delightfully disgusting intonations.

There's very little I can find objectively wrong with Urn of Blood, as most of my complaints come down more to my inability to mesh with certain aspects of the Death Metal style rather than anything concrete and universal. Really the only reason I am not giving this a near perfect score is because, well, there isn't really a reason to! The riffs aren't that great, the solos aren't that innovative, and the drumming isn't that amazing to behold. So, while this album is leagues ahead of most Death Metal today, it still stops just short of being truly spectacular.