Pissgrave - Posthumous Humiliation

In 2015, Philadelphia’s Pissgrave took the death metal underground by storm through the sheer filth and vile gore of their debut LP, Suicide Euphoria, whose cover alone (which consisted of a realistic photograph of human bones, feces and other liquefied remains either rotting or being dissolved in a bathtub) caught even the most seasoned death metal fans off guard, and the band’s new album’s cover photograph is somehow even more visceral. While I always include the cover art to albums I discuss, and I have included the cover to this album as well, I have chosen to move it to the bottom of this post because it is especially realistic (it is a photograph, after all) so as to not traumatize those who might be traumatized by the sight of real life gore. Chances are, if you’re into death meal and you’re reading about Pissgrave, though, you’re pretty numb to blood and guts and the gore here is probably just another of hundreds, if not thousands of abominable album covers you’ve seen. But you never know. Regardless, I did want to spend some time talking about the artwork associated with this album because it does kind of necessitate a discussion about its use of gore and real human suffering.

I don’t know exactly how the band or their management came into possession of the photograph gracing the cover of this new album, but regardless of how ethically the band obtained it, using it as an album cover came with some responsibility that I’m not quite sure was upheld as well as it could have been. While the modus operandi of death metal has largely been to revel in violence and gore in a campy or perhaps profound manner, this album cover only seems to serve to outdo the edginess of other death metal covers and that of the band’s debut. Being that this is not the usual fictional depiction of death and suffering of most death metal covers, but rather an actual depiction of the aftermath of a real life ended violently in some manner, it comes off as tasteless and indeed disrespectful to whoever this person was and the people connected to him. Yes, it sure does help the album live up to its title because it’s putting this person’s death and their mutilated body on display for entertainment. Sure, it perhaps beckons pondering of the way we view death and shy away from its gritty details and how we see certain deaths as unnatural, but aside from the song titles and the flowery album descriptions associated with it, the band and their management do nothing but revel in how bold of a move the use if the cover is. There are no lyrics to explain what the band are trying to accomplish with the album cover, so with only the titles and the album’s descriptions, there’s nothing really making this album cover anything more artistically than what it is literally, a mutilated, dead face. I do think that it’s possible that if the photograph was obtained ethically that there could indeed have been some justifiable artistic premise for its use as the cover, but Pissgrave seem content to leave it at simply “celebration of pure torment and misery”, which is essentially just death metal syntactical white noise without anything else to supplement it to give it more profound meaning (ironic given the name of the label releasing this). In other words, the band don’t really do anything with it, it’s just trying to be shocking, and again, in this genre, it really isn’t even all that shocking, just try-hard. Yes, in death metal exuding brutality and comfortability with the darkness of death is a big part of establishing credibility within it, but that doesn’t mean that every artistic move for brutality’s sake is justified. It wasn’t excusable when Mayhem did it with Dead’s suicide for Dawn of the Black Hearts in 1995, and it’s not beyond reproach for Pissgrave and Posthumous Humiliation now. And criticizing it is part of keeping the genre’s artistic boundaries within a healthy margin of the boundaries of ethics, so as to minimize and avoid as much as possible the types of atrocities that made early 2nd wave Norwegian black metal scene so deservedly notoriously condemned (yes, a lot of those main figures were very fucked in the head and even if they produced some great art, the means and the lives they lived to do so were not always justified). I’m not trying to say this is on the level of activity that Varg’s murder of Euronymous or even the entire NSBM scene is; I’m just trying to say that even though death metal strives to push artistic boundaries and use gore for art, there are still boundaries worth respecting because it is still an art. If anything, perhaps the silver lining of the tactless use of this photograph is a reminder to those involved in making dark art to be tactful with the use of sensitive material such as this. Anyway, with that out of the way, on to the music of this album, because I sure do enjoy it.

Posthumous Humiliation is hardly any different from its predecessor stylistically; it’s a chaotic, storm of gratuitous drum fills, blast beats, atop downward spiraling tremolo guitar work akin to that of Portal’s Ion, and harsh growled vocals sounding as though they’re coming through a pillow or a static-y air control radio. The description the band/label give the album is indeed accurate; it’s a deep indulgence in all of the sonic depravity that death metal is built on and continues to build on. However, from the moment I heard the first single and opening track, the furiously ripping “Euthanasia”, I knew it was going to be an at least somewhat more accomplished album musically. The dizzying lead guitar work, tinged with black metal tritone dissonance, was a lot more vibrant and confident, much less hurried than what was on Suicide Euphoria, as well as being more prominent and less buried beneath the barrage of sound the rhythm section drums up.

While it’s possible to go into the nitty gritty details of the appeal of each song on here, this is the kind of album whose entire sonic style is either too ridiculously gross, guttural, or incomprehensible to be your style, or it’s exactly the spice you need among all the polished death metal in your listening rotation.

There is variety to be found amid the merciless madness of Posthumous Humiliation, faster and slower aspects of the instrumentation to juxtapose each other amid the dense, debris-filled winds of the album’s ethos as a whole, and indeed plenty of time during which everything is being fired at full power at full speed. While initial listens will definitely hide a lot of the nuance this album does have and make most of the album come off as one big sickening death metal mess, closer, repeated listens show what each of the individual songs do have to offer that the others don’t and what justifies their separation into different tracks as opposed to being lumped into a homogeneous single 43-minute piece.

The second song, “Canticles of Ripping Flesh”, is a faster, more straightforward death metal tune with a lot of early Cannibal Corpse influence behind it that the band works rather well with, and the songs “Into the Deceased” and “Posthumous Humiliation” take faster, old-school death amd thrash metal approaches and twist them through warped modern sadism and black metal nihilism with the wall of sound the band conjures. Meanwhile songs like “Emaciated” and album’s third, “Funeral Inversion”, show some of the band’s versatility as the latter rides lower drum tempos (albeit supplemented by plenty of double-bass) over slightly down-tuned guitars in a more subtly menacing manner, which the subsequent, ominous “Catacombs of Putrid Chambers” expands on with it s ride cymbal-driven and classic-thrash-chugger-inspired palm-muted groove of its attack.

The closing track, “Rusted Wind”, with its less-supplemented, slowed down guitar lead outro is a bit underwhelming, but it doesn’t completely undo the stormy, gory vibe the album builds up beforehand. Overall, though, Posthumous Humiliation is the satisfyingly disgusting follow-up Suicide Euphoria deserved. It’s not by any means a tremendous leap in quality that accomplishes much of anything new for Pissgrave, but it’s a good way foe the band to prove that Suicide Euphoria was neither a fluke, nor a flash in the pan, and that their creative well is still flowing with indulgent death metal depravity. While the underuse of the cover photograph does shed some blemish on the artistic motive of this album, I am willing to give the band the benefit of the doubt that it was just a miscalculated move to up their aesthetic that stepped outside the bounds of tastefulness (and hopefully not good ethics) by accident.

Mezmerizingly gross/10

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Close your eyes for a second as you’re scrolling past this if realistic gore doesn’t sit well with you.

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Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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