Death metal that feels particularly gruesome is a nice way to treat the brain after enduring countless real-life atrocities driven by having the gall to try to keep up with daily events. That feeling of horror and bloodshed that isn’t playing out on your phone or television can be weirdly comforting, taking your mind to somewhere morbid in a different way?

Seattle-based death metal destroyers Re-Buried provide the perfect diversion from daily chaos and instead import you into the world of blood-splattering horrors and gruesome skullduggery. “Flesh Mourning,” their second album, is pure, real death metal that makes your insides feel disgusting and that would make anyone new to this type of music recoil in horror. This isn’t Hot Topic shit. No offense. The kids need a gateway after all. Instead, the band—vocalist Chris Pinto (also of Fõrn), guitarists Paul Richards (who also add Wurlitzer, if you can believe it), Ed Bingaman, and Daniel Racines, bassist Clayton Wolff, drummer Alex Bytnar—rubs your face in the blood and guts and delivers an ugly battering that will warp your brain.

“Obitual Illusion” drills open with guitars scuffing and growls retching vomitously, smothering with ugly hammering. The dire mentality continues as the punishment grinds, the howls blur, and everything bleeds into a gutter. “Jagged Psyche” rushes with guitars blistering, guitars cutting into flesh, growls hissing in horror. The leads swelter as beastly carnage accrues, the growls belching into eerie keys and abject horror. “Rotted Back to Life” has the bass buzzing and a slow, doomy storm rumbling, eventually turning headlong into battering guitars work. Deep growls gut as the heaviness pierces organs, crushing with menace. “Chainsaw Ritual” starts with, obviously, a saw firing up, howls mauling, and an infernal, sooty attack choking. The brutality floods dangerously, torture peaking, crushing to the final gory moments.

The title track has guitars encircling, the growls sickening, and the pace decimating, the playing slowly picking up steam. The punishment crawls but mangles, the humidity grows to unmanageable levels, and growls spit stomach acid from the guts. “Pestilence Fog” starts with guitars carving through flesh, doomy waters lapping with blackness, death stirring and driving into madness. A calculated beating drags bodies over the earth, and growls snarl, the playing cutting down everything before it. “Putridity in Existence” slowly unfurls, the heat rising noticeably, growls boiling in blood as the muscular chaos flexes. Pained howls jar as the guitar work tangles brain wiring, the tempo swaggers, and the growing ash collects and heads into sinister instrumental closer “Cold Blood.” This is a fitting, unsettling end with visions of strange horror conjured by the guitars, the spirit getting blacker and uglier before being pulled from your imagination.

Reburied certainly make their best effort at claiming the mantle of one of death metal’s most disgusting, destructive bands on “Flesh Mourning.” Strains of their doom past make things icier and more nausea inducing, and they succeed with every inch of terror folded into this creation. This is not easily digestible death, it’s not polished, and it goes right for the jugular, which  should find favor with anyone looking for something gruesome and unforgiving.

For more on the band, go here: https://re-buried.bandcamp.com/

To buy the album, go here: https://translationloss.com/collections/re-buried-collection

For more on the label, go here: https://translationloss.com/