### Disgorge: She lay gutted

#### 16/06/11 || The Duff

Often I look back on reviews from years ago and think my opinions to have changed since the time of writing, but I still have no regrets with what I wrote about “Consume the Forsaken”. Said that, my take on Disgorge has improved, principally that I now understand the fuss caused over them by the brutal death metal alumni. It’s just that they never stop to breathe, and with tough on the ears productions to their albums they consequently are a difficult act to fully enjoy.

One thing that truly does pain me about Disgorge is that I only ever absorb about fifty percent of their records; when I devote the attention, I’m endlessly nodding my head appreciatively at the effort gone into the riffs, the arrangements, the dynamics and the musicianship, but spend two seconds elsewhere like admiring a bumblebee pollinating a flower within the warm hue of an afternoon sun and I come back to “WHAT THA FACK IS GAIN’ ON?!” (boy, does that never get old). Riffs are not structured in a straightforward manner, and can also appear very similar well beyond ten listens in.

So, a demo or debut album that doesn’t seem much valued, and we’re with the band’s sophomore effort, pretty much the same quality as witnessed on “Consume the Forsaken” although this probably seen as less of a BDM standard by which all is measured; the maturity isn’t quite there, but the bulk sound for what I consider to this day one of the most brutal bands to have risen was set on “She Lay Gutted”. The production from one album to the other doesn’t seem to have improved vastly, so inhospitable this is if only less muggy, less impacting but as such drier and easier to make sense of if only not so fine-tuned.

There is no doubt that these guys can play; they take the style of Deeds of Flesh to a more extreme, more rounded and ultimately more interesting field of play, mixing barbaric, turbulent riffing a mile a second that can blur into one note if you’re not willing to do the band justice – it is very easily done to switch off in no small part due to the unremitting nature of Ricky Myers’ drumming which, in traditional BDM fashion, is turned up way high in the mix as well as the seemingly very repetitive riffing the first hundred spins. Dedication is a must.

Pinch harmonics and the odd seconds where the band slows down plus the quite derivative three note breakdowns (they do play the part of beating you down, though) will be the pointers by which you’ll learn to absorb the album’s many intricacies, and in time it will take hold to reveal a classic little gem – my opinion in many ways since my “Consume the Forsaken” review remains steadfast, but I can’t deny Disgorge are a killer band and “She Lay Gutted” presenting some of the best of the sub-genre in much the same way unmatched as with Suffocation’s “Effigy of the Forgotten”.

- Information
- Released: 1999
- Label: Unique Leader
- Website: Disgorge MySpace
- Band
- Matti Way: vocals
- Diego Sanchez: guitars
- Ben Marlin: bass
- Ricky Myers: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Revelations XVIII
- 02. She Lay Gutted
- 03. Exhuming the Disemboweled
- 04. Compost Devourment
- 05. Sodomize the Bleeding
- 06. False Conception
- 07. Womb Full of Scabs
- 08. Disfigured Catacombs
- 09. Purifying the Cavity