Interesting that Willowtip- purveyors of ‘Forward Thinking Death Metal’, and home of Ulcerate and Gigan- have turned out the new Blood Freak album, which owes considerably more to the entrails-spattered likes of Carcass, Impetigo or Exhumed. Mindscraper is a sickening work of gory death (with a fittingly ludicrous album cover) with a sound like an open wound.

First track Psychoplasmics is a curious start: a tip-tapping electronic beat with some similarities to (yes) Morbid Angel’s Radikult, but which successfully manages to pull off ‘sickly and sleazy’ rather than ‘shockingly lame’ owing to the unsettlingly tasteless samples that go over the top. For the most part, though, Mindscraper is a forty five minute vomit of grinding mania, with dense and frantic riffing evoking early Carcass, cleaned up ever-so-slightly and roughly extended into much longer songs. Tracks like Scared Stiff feature thunderous rhythm guitar lines that belch and rumble through a stinking four minutes of rapidfire mulch. The generally chaotic feel of it is enhanced greatly by the dual vocals, split between urgent high-pitched screech and intestinal burp, a pincer attack of horrible ferocity (and another Carcass tactic). This is generally the drill for the vast majority of the album, but it’s sometimes a little more structured. Slaughterhouse Recollections, for example, features both some truly stomach-churning slow riffing and a rare foray into thrashy guitar soloing.

All told, it isn’t the most exciting record. Mindscraper probably suffers from being reviewed in the same week as horror-metal godfathers Necrophagia’s latest. Whilst they’re very different albums- this is way faster and way scuzzier- Deathtrip 69 has a more obvious sense of sleazy fun which (aside from the introduction) doesn’t really come across here. Still, it is bloodily effective, in its own way, at delivering the death metal manifesto that is expressed eloquently in the samples of Psychoplasmics: as something that will ‘upset your mom’.