AVULSED - Ritual Zombi CD

Avulsed is about as synonymous to Spanish death metal at this point as my Keurig coffee maker is to breakfast, but when you break down the band's trajectory they've been all over the place. Taking a 'tour' of the death metal genre, from the humble 90s brutality of their first proper 90s full length Eminence in Putrescence, which was itself rather old school in nature with a clear lineage to the first few Death records...to outings like Stabwound Orgasm and Yearning for the Grotesque which took on slightly more 'gore drenched' characteristics that one might relate to US acts Cannibal Corpse, Exhumed or Impaled. They even failed at a techno-death metal remix thing in Cybervoid. But thankfully, through most of their career, they've focused on baser songwriting aesthetics like simplified riffs and grooves, sparse but well-formed melodies, and I've always had the impression that they've just never properly shaken off their roots to surrender to the ranks of brutechnicality that became ever more prominent upon the turn of the century. At its core, Avulsed has always characterized the 'retro' death metal theme, before it WAS retro, even when it seemed, from their often explicit cover images, that they were escaping that. And speaking of cover art, Ritual Zombi, their 6th full-length, absolutely slays...