Battle rages on. The smell of death and canon powder is everywhere. Soldiers and horses are killed by dozens alike. Blood and innards flood the battlefield. It’s all about gore, sweat, fear and taking life’s or having yours taken by the enemy but something can make a difference: how far would someone go to save the fallen?After the origins of pathology with the story of Vesalius with 2020’s “Sicknesses Obsessions”, Putrid Offal’s second full-length in 30 years, “Obliterated Life”, explores the life of Dominique-Jean Larrey (1766-1842) who invented the ambulance and practiced war medicine amputating soldiers right behind the frontline, opening rib cages, extirpating bullets from entrails and suturing bowels within the rancid smell of ongoing septicemia and that’s exactly what our band of brothers in gore offers musically with this new effort! Violence? You bet? But again, there’s far more that meats the dead eye with these sick pathologists: stellar musicianship, relentless grooves, face-melting bursts of raging blasts, gurgling growls and demented screams, served as a platter of splatter with an ample and massive production and mastering. “Obliterated Life” is definitely the band’s absolute masterpiece of rotted flesh offering not only a total grinding virulence but sliced by neck breaking grooves and odd time signatures. A curveball of scholar pathologicism! Wouldn’t you think you became God if you’d decide of who dies and who lives to die on the battlefield? That’s how sick Dominique-Jean Larrey became. That’s how twisted “Obliterated Life” is. You’re definitely not ready for that but who cares? Let There Be Rot !
