I always get a little snarky when a band’s first release for a label is also their demo/album that originally came out anywhere from a month to years prior. I get the feeling the band’s got new material in the bag or “almost ready”, but one party or another wanted to buy some time for whatever reason.
‘Hostile Fruiting Bodies’ blooms and looms large, towering, crimson-bathed riffs and near-sludge pacing in parts, gnarled OBITUARY-an gore (think Cause Of Death) in others, the section from 1:16-1:33 being particularly Cro-Magnon in its abuse. Slow, and with a tinge of sable-hued psychedelia, I kept expecting the beginning of ‘Cede To The Saprophyte’ to be building up to something, but BLOOD SPORE does. not. fucking. let. up, choosing instead to spend around five of its over seven minutes infecting with the persistence of time and rot, dragging us through the filth, choiceless and doomed. Closer ‘Apex Colony’ further confirms my suspicion that what this trio actually is, at its heart, is a sludge band with a serious hard-on for death metal, and the ability to play both with legitimacy.
In the case of this EP, though, time is of no consequence, and if “prettying up” the slathering, viral onslaught we must succumb to within Fungal Warfare Upon All Life is the goal on the sure-to-be-in-the-works debut full-length, I hope BLOOD SPORE fails…miserably.
Review By: Lord Randall
BLOOD SPORE
Fungal Warfare Upon All Life
Blood Harvest Records
4 / 6