In terms of released material it has been almost 10 years since i’ve listened to Belgium’s Aborted with any earnest.
“Engineering the dead” and “Goremageddon: the saw and the damage done” offered a brutal and satisfying taste of the bands earlier work that was quickly tarnished with the release of 2005’s “The Archaic Abattoir”. 2007’s “Slaughter & Apparatus: A Methodical Overture” had me initially excited after hearing that Aussie drummer Dave Haley (Psycroptic) had played session drums on it, but any hopes were quickly sent packing before even half of the album had been heard in its duration. Disappointed, I gave their next effort “Strychnine.213” a wide berth.
Which brings us to their latest effort “Global Flatline”: An album that is of better quality than their past 3 albums but one that still stands as a collection of unimpressive grind.
Omega Mortis -the album’s title track- is an amalgamation of sampled spoken word, eerie ambience, and the sounds of a heart-rate monitor that gets out of the way quickly before the barrage of drums and guitar crashes in on “Global Flatline” the album’s first real song. The first decent song comes next. “The origin of disease” is a varied and slightly above average track that blends fast paced deathgrind with hardcore-esque breakdowns. Its probably no surprise that this track was chosen as a single, as the bulk of the remaining album just degrades into fast but monotonous dissonance with occasional flashes of quality usually in the form of bridges or interludes that stray from the monotony. Particular examples of this are demonstrated in tracks such as “Fecal Forgery” (Fucking lovely name huh?…).
An exception is the track “Expurgation Euphoria” which is a slower paced number that begins with a spoken word introduction complimented by sinister sounding guitars. The song then dives into a off timed mid tempo grind and exits with lower volumed, eerie keys. Another is “Our Father, Who Art Of Feces” (again with the feces) which has enough moderately classy riff dynamics to help it avoid discovering the less favourable fates of the other albums tracks. The album tries to mix things up near the end by including the lengthy number “Endstille” that features a 3 minute instrumental intro with sampled vocals and ends with a slow plodding latter half featuring a mix between spoken word sections and the usual screamed lyric delivery. However, none of this is particularly impressive.
The last track on the album comes in the form of re-recorded version of “Nailed through her cunt” from the “Engineering the Dead” album. Ironically this song succeed’s in being the best track on the album while failing to stand up to the original (despite the horrible title) both in instrumental delivery and production style.
One additional thing that should be noted is that the production is terrible. Not in a low-fi way, but in a extremely clean sterile way that takes away an edge that combined with competent song writing (riffs and transitions if you will) makes for a quality death metal release.
Overall this album is an extremely mixed bag that is difficult to recommend to anyone wholeheartedly. You can do much better when it comes to this style of music. There are many examples that come to mind, but you would be doing yourself a favour to listen to “Descent into heresy” by Keitzer or “All guts no glory” by Exhumed instead of this.
Fermata over Whole Rest 