Vomitory, for me, was always one of those B-division bands that did its thing and did it well, but never even approached the standing of the premier set of Death Metal bands, the Obituarys and Entombeds that made the music that Death Metal fans worshipped without question. Well, call me an idiot but Vomitory have here proved just why so many Vomitory-ans out there follow the Swedes’ every move; album number seven in the band’s twentieth year of existence proving that something has been keeping their nose to the grindstone. You know what that something is? The spirit of Death Metal, nothing more, nothing less, a rock-solid wall of sheer power and grinding brutality that any fan of the genre should be squealing with delight over.

Not that you’d get any of those silly pig squeals with Vomitory, of course, Carnage Euphoria being straight-up Bolt Thrower meets Napalm Death meets Entombed, that crushing Swedish sound that’s tried and true. Where this band excels, however, is songwriting, taking a formula that you might well have thought to have been driven six feet deep into the ground and creating a kickass album. Each and every song present is amazingly heavy, the band firing on all cylinders and ensuring that your neck will be a bloody ruin by the time you’ve finished... assuming you have the sheer willpower not to listen again, of course! Everything that makes me love straight-up Death Metal is present and correct here, the crushing heaviness, the hidden-in-plain-view technical skill, the crazed solos, the casual addition of catchy riffs here and there to allow fans to tell songs apart... it all adds up, and whilst the new wave of Deathcore fans will probably complain about the sheer unrelenting intensity of it all, the old-schoolers will know where it’s at.

This is a slice of that pie that always hits a certain spot, the aural heroin that stops me from becoming a complete Prog freak, keeps me returning to the brutality. The more you listen to Carnage Euphoria, the better the songs get, from the melodic soloing in the Serpents to the Thrashy likes of A Lesson In Virulence. Of course, this is all one-of-a-kind music, but Vomitory have enough years in the business (formed 1989!) by now to know how to keep you listening and really there isn’t a weak track present, Ripe Cadavers especially putting its head down and charging like a rotten zombie elephant, one of those magnificently heavy breakdowns stomping on your head repeatedly.

As my by now contractual dig at Deathcore earlier may suggest, this is pretty much for old-school Death Metalheads only. It ain’t pretty, but it is surprisingly clever, and whilst this won’t compete with those Tech-Death albums on your shelf, it is a refreshing blast that Death Metal types everywhere should get a kick from.