### Suture: Skeletal vortex

#### 24/07/12 || Averatu

Lets start with the bad news. To put it nicely, the overall sound of this album is, problematic. It’s at times almost painful to listen to. On my ear-bud headphones I could hear that there is lots going on, but it lacks definition. Imagine if you will, walking into a public mens room and hearing non-descriptive music blurting from those cheap ceiling mounted speakers reverberating off the tiles, while some guy is working hard in a cubicle on evacuating last nights Chicken Masala. And we try again…

On the Hi-Fi it sounds severely tinny. It mostly seems like a battle for supremacy between the vocals, snare drum and guitar, with all parties losing. If I were a DJ, I would not consider playing this unless I intended send people running of the dance floor, clutching their hands to their bleeding ears. These days you have demos recorded by kids in their bedrooms that sound better than this. So we apply extreme EQ and move on…

Right off the mark, Suture competently deliver tight brutal death with a flavour somewhere between Suffocation and Gorguts on the Righter scale. They chose to stick to convention, there’s no real genre bending to be heard, just straight up traditional noodle, noodle, blast, chug and grunt. I’d imagine these guys being decent live. The highlight comes at the end of the album. Track 8, “In a state of progressive disintegration” and track 9, “Chaossuary”. In these songs the ideas are given space to develop, “In a state of progressive disintegration” even has an interesting melody with counter harmony, without straying into melodeath territory. If they are working on new material for a future album, I’d hope they’d explore this direction. The rest of the tracks being jam packed full of riffs and changes to the extent that I’d prescribe a course of Ritalin for the whole band. There are many killer moments on this album, but seriously, just as you start getting into a riff or a groove, they’ve moved onto something else, and this is an issue shared with most death and tech metal bands I come across. To write self indulgent music is fine, because the band knows how brilliant it is to do a tremolo over a blast beat at 200bpm and then change time signature without missing a beat and do this six times a minute , but its all meaningless to the vast majority of metal fans, and when you remove the listener from the experience, you’re just playing with yourself again.

In a nutshell, standard oldschool brutal death metal, very well performed, sounds like it was recorded and mixed in 1991. I wanted to score this higher, but the sound issues really affected the result.

- Information
- Released: 2008 (re-issue 2012)
- Label: Soulflesh Collector Records
- Website: Suture MySpace
- Band
- Jayson Ramsay: drums and vocals
- Jason McIntyre: guitars
- Bruno Muenzler: bass

- Tracklist
- 01. Escaping the confines of my skin
- 02. Black blood proginy
- 03. Skeletal vortex
- 04. Opprobbrium
- 05. Exiled to undead
- 06. Crude methods of punishment
- 07. Overseer to the end of days
- 08. In a state of progressive disintegration
- 09. Chaossuary