There can’t be many people who don’t agree with the assertion that a band name is important. Our collective musical history is littered with band names that are brilliantly evocative (Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Emperor) as well as those where, if truth be known, they didn’t really try at all: Panic! At the Disco, Texas is the Reason, Cute is What We Aim For [and my personal favourite We Butter The Bread With Butter – Reviews Ed] all need to see me after school for a chat.
Of late, band names tend to give you an almost intuitive sense of what the music is going to sound like, and, let’s be fair, you know already that Sodomized Cadaver are going to be a death metal band, don’t you? Yes, you do and yes, they are. Sodomized Cadaver hail from Ebbw Vale in the South Wales valleys. Ebbw Vale is probably best known for two things – its steel and mining heritage and a tough and uncompromising rugby union team (famously known as The Steelmen after the town’s industrial history). Ebbw Vale is but one of many South Wales valleys towns where there often isn’t a lot to do, so forming a band can be a creative and positive outlet for many. What Messrs Gavin Davies and Raymond Packer have created with this five track EP is straight out of the death metal box, albeit one dripping in gore and generally unpleasant themes.
Calling your EP after a sexual predilection that fantasises you or your partner being eaten alive gives you a sense on where these valley boys are coming from and with song titles like ‘Cannibal Butcher’, ‘Torture’, and ‘Weapons of Mass Decomposition’ there might not be much room for creative manoeuvring, but at least you know where you stand and they know, rather all too well, what gets their audience salivating.
With influences that range across the often diverse palette of extreme music, there’s plenty of Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse dripping through the grooves as well as bits of Bolt Thrower and The Black Dahlia Murder. Someone is clearly in awe of Bill Steer’s guitar playing on Carcass records, too.
At one level you could be critical at the cartoon like imagery conjured up by Vorarephilia (SWEM) and wonder whether it is all a bit juvenile – we have been there and done this all before. However, another part of me wants to give these boys the benefit of the doubt as I sense a pretty black sense of humour running through all of this. For all the bludgeon and dismemberment, under all that flesh, gore and mutilated body parts I can’t shake the sense that there’s also a glint in their collective eye, a sense that they also know this is not for real and we should just go with the energetic and pulverizing flow that they have created. I bet they love their mums, too.
Visceral and intense, as these things need to be.
7.0/10
MAT DAVIES