Review of Severe Torture - Butchery of the Soul

First of all, if any of you haven't figured out yet, this is a split EP from the bands Severe Torture and Blood Red Throne. Hammerheart Records decided to toss this one at the exclusively American fans to build up some hype for the new releases soon to come out for both artists. When looking at scoring this I thought about giving separate scores for each band's EP, but then I thought you're getting both when you buy it, so I decided to combine the scores to average them in a sense. Let me just start by saying I enjoyed the material from Blood Red Throne much more than that of Severe Torture. Let's start from the beginning. Severe Torture leads off the album with the first six songs. The first is taken from their debut LP, Feasting on Blood, while all other tracks, except for Perverse Suffering (a Cannibal Corpse cover), are taken from their early EPs. The production is decent, but varies between the tracks, because of a few of them coming from EPs early in the bands career, which of course don't have quite as good a production level as the first track Butchery of the Soul. The music on the album is really heavy chunky riffs found through out with some decent grooves thrown in for good measure. Dennis' vokills are that akin to the low guttural caveman grunts. I found after a few listens Severe Torture's sound just got a bit old to me, and just didn't seem that exciting. Not to mention the C.C. cover isn't as good as the original. The lyrics are what you could expect from a band named Severe Torture. Yes, you guessed it, the almighty gore lyrics! As I've said before gore lyrics are never that exciting, and tend to be boring and it seems like an easy way to get out of writing serious lyrics. The later half of the album is what kept me coming back for more. Blood Red Throne openly admits they never set out to change the world of metal, they just want to play music like that of the bands that had influence on them; those bands being mostly early 90's death metal like Death, Obituary, Carcass, and Deicide. Can you argue with them though? I sure can't, I love old-school death metal, and this album reeks of it. Tchort (of Emperor and Satyricon fame) and Død do an awesome job on the guitars. There are some sweet grooves in here, added to brutal riffs and some really cool note based riffs. Some of my favorite guitar work is found in Blood Red Throne's first track, Ravenous War Machine. The EP showcases the vokills of former Blood Red Throne singer Ronni Thorsen and the current Mr. Hustler. Their vokills are pretty close to each other, the standard brutal death growl. The lyrics are pretty cool, which isn't too much of a surprise considering Tchort wrote them (although the song Cryptic Realms was not written by him). Blood Red Throne showcases Tchort's expansive musicianship. The guy has done black metal, death metal and doom metal and he does a good job at all of them. The production is pretty solid throughout despite the fact that the material is taken from four different recordings. When it comes down to it I have to say after about the first five listens I went pretty much straight to the Blood Red Throne material and have been ever since. It contains everything you could ever love about old-school death metal. I think the next purchases in order for Ravenous will be Blood Red Throne's Monument of Death and their new one, Affiliated with Suffering, when it's released. According to the promo stuff received with the CD this split EP should be for the priced as if it were one EP and is worth picking up if you want to check out either band. I much prefer the Blood Red Throne material and the reason this album didn't get a better score is because the Severe Torture material brought the scores down. Bottom Line: If you have yet to hear Blood Red Throne, buy this to get a good sampling of what the band is all about. They're nothing ground breaking but they plain and simple kick ass.

Release Details

Severe Torture

Butchery of the Soul

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