Band's List Technical Death Gutted (HUN) Defiled

[Originally posted November 30, 2011]

Hungarian brutal death metal, veerrryyy interesting, Gutted is the only Hungarian band that I am currently aware of. I haven’t even been listening to these guys for more than two months and I already love them. They have been around for over 10 years now (making this album ten years old!), and yet they still remain obscure and unknown to the majority of us metalheads. I feel that Gutted deserves a lot more attention than what they are currently getting. I don’t know a whole lot about them and their history, so I don’t know how much media attention they’ve gotten (if any). There are so many brutal death metal bands out there (I’ve recently found out), and a lot of them suck! Some examples would be Orchidectomy, Biological Monstrosity, pre-2010 Waking the Cadaver, Sadistic Mutilation, The Eye of Yoda, and Let this Die (who should do exactly what their name says). Gutted is one of the brutal bands that has spoken out to me saying “We are not shit!!!!” After hearing this album once, you will compulsively play it again and again.

Even though I’ve been talking about pure brutal death so far, these guys like to shake things up a little and throw some grindcore here and there and every once in a while they’ll pull off a breakdown. Considering that this album was made by an extremely unknown band in 2001, the production and sound quality is outstanding. I guess the prices on recording equipment went down in the late 1990s. The overall skill of the musicians and…what’s this? Exhaled vocals?? Now that’s not something that I hear very often in underground brutal death! And not only that, they’re guttural and deep! Oh man I must be dreaming!! (Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit) But still, it’s not as common as you think. They have one of the much better vocalists in the genre, and I’m glad that they’ve kept him too.

Their drummer doesn’t do traditional blast beat drumming. He have some fast kickdrum action going on though. His drumming consists of almost constant kickdrumming and really technical and abstract use of the rest of the set. I do wish that the kickdrums had more of a punch instead of having a clicking sound (a lot of albums have this problem). The bass guitar is also too high-pitched, I can’t hear very much of the deep tone coming out of the bass as I would like to. I’m a bass player myself, and I’m also a bass junkie, so I’m truly satisfied when there’s lots of it in the music I listen to.

I feel that this is Gutted’s best album. Their second album is just as good, but showed some lack of focus, and their most recent album is still very satisfying, but isn’t nearly as juicy and unique as Defiled. Anyone who has not heard of this band and is a cool person should either listen to this album at least three times or buy the damn thing! This album gets 17/20.