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Necrophagist – Epitaph
Album | 03/08/2004 | Relapse Records
32:54 | 8 tracks | Vinyl/CD/Digital
Technical Death Metal
Gaggenau, Germany
The Final Chapter of a Fragment
In 2002, German TecDeath spearhead Necrophagist had already been stripped from all founding members but Muhammed Suiçmez. But for the high skilled musician and songwriter, the show had to go on, and thus the recording of a second official longplayer began. The term that describes this process best, is probably nerdy. Suiçmez used freeware like Guitar Pro and Power Tab Editor to compose, and then began to record his tracks. Following, the other band members also finished their recordings, and then sent them to mastermind Suiçmez.
Nowadays, such a procedure is quite common, and many bands, especially those with international line-ups, record like this. Nevertheless, you have to imagine, this was the era of MySpace and ICQ when the internet connection in Germany was even worse than it is today. Therefore, this was indeed something special. It was furthermore, the last Necrophagist album even though Suiçmez and some fellow artists worked on new material after the release of Epitaph. But in 2016, it was finally announced that the days of Necrophagist are over.
Baroque and Gore
Necrophagist were a unique phenomenon, and even among the nerdiest spheres of TecDeath and Prog Death, the band around Muhammed Suiçmez stuck out from the masses. Compositions that were inspired by Baroque and Death Metal simultaneously were probably never made for the masses, but Necrophagist somehow managed to entertain the people despite the demaning nature of their music. With the second and last longplayer Epitaph, the band reached the climax of their sophisticated brutality just at the right time. The early 2000s were a great time for TecDeath, and bands such as Suffocation or The Faceless succesfully rode this wave alongside Necrophagist and many others.
Epitaph is a very intelligent and simultaneously brutal album, the combination of blunt force and precise cuts. Only feature that can sound displaced in its quantity is the staccato rhythmic on every track which does indeed resemble Guitar Pro a lot. A part from that, Epitaph and its predecessor Onset of Putrefaction are the reason why Necrophagist are immortal.
9/10 Mangoes
Next week in this series:
Fad Gadget – Gag (01/02/1984 | Mute Records)
We will dance again
Mia Schem
