Band:	Caustic Wound
Album:	Death Posture
Style:	Grindcore
Release date:	April 2020

01. Death Posture
02. Cemetery Planet
03. Visions Of Torture
04. Black Bag Asphyxiation
05. Terror Bomber
06. Blast Casualty
07. Ritual Trappings
08. Uranium Decay
09. Cabal
10. Acid Attack
11. Invisible Cell
12. Guillotine
13. Automated Weapons Systems
14. Cataclysmic Gigaton

Real life grotesque cover art? Check. Gurgles so low they seem taken from the bowels of hell? Check. OSDM riffs played over the speed limit but crushingly slow too? Check. It's grind time!

There's something really great about the mix of death metal and grindcore, and we've been having a fair deal of bands this year whose new releases sat on that border. WVRM and Wake, but it is the one which doesn't start with 'W' and also the only one that's a debut that really had me feeling like throwing my desk through my window. Caustic Wound's instrumental branch is 1/4 Magrudergrind and 3/4 Mortiferum, with the Cerebral Rot and Fetid vocalist behind the mic. And with 4/5 of the band coming from a primarily death metal background, it ain't no wonder how much this sounds like death metal.

But I'd be hard pressed to find a death metal album that is 20 minutes long in which less than a third of the tracks are over two minutes long and none of which are over four minutes. There's that, and there's also how much it sounds like that early Carcass and early Terrorizer to keep it somewhat detached from the usual breakneck of modern grind. Breakneck it still is regardless, but it also thankfully brings a bit of doom death in its slower menacing parts, probably courtesy of half the band being in Mortiferum, making this grind feel absolutely cavernous, like its death metal counterpart.

In its short runtime, there never really is a moment wasted, nor one where it feels like it drags on for too long, so it gets away with doing just what it does best, which is alternating paces between the grindy speed and the doomy slow. But it's a contrast that really works and you can't help but get your neck moving. The riffs are bludgeoning, the solos actually work, the vocals are filthy, and I couldn't have asked for a more fitting production to really make this feel engaging. Everything really falls into place to make this blend of death doom and grind as homogeneous as it can be.

It's not really anything original, but it takes on two sounds that I'm surprised I don't see blended together more often, and it takes on them masterfully.