I believe it was no lesser authority than the extreme metal pioneer and philosopher Mary ‘Descanting The Insalubrious’ Poppins who coined the death metal axiom:
In every job that must be done There is an element of fun You find the fun and snap! The job's a game And every task you undertake Becomes a piece of cake A lark! A spree! It's very clear to see that A Spoonful of sugar helps the metal go down The death metal go down-wown The death metal go down Just a spoonful of sugar helps the death metal go down In a most delightful way Ave Satani!!
Carcass have yet to commit their fealty to Mary Poppins and all her vile works to the public record but it is very clear that they were thinking of very little else during the recording of Heartwork.
I hadn’t heard a single note of Carcass before I saw them play live. In my head they were the Scouse lot, who made grunting noises and went in for hideous medical images on their covers*. They opened for Body Count when I saw them play in Bradford Maestros on 3rd December 1993 with my mate Lee. They were really good too, not at all what I was expecting, there was precision and melody where I had just expected extremity.
Flash forward to me holding a copy of Heartwork.
Recorded in Liverpool, bedecked with a H.R Giger cover**, Heartwork was released in October 1993 to a lot of acclaim. For such a previously extreme, fringe band^ this was quite a first. That Carcass did this without compromise but by focus and precision, makes this LP all the more interesting.
The most immediate track on Heartwork for me is ‘No Love Lost’. It isn’t lightning fast, it has a great tune, the guitars have something of a dark Alice In Chains tone to them. It is only the remarkably venomous vocals of Jeff Walker, he sings as though he was spitting toxin, that point the way to heavier pastures. I can’t separate out Bill Steer and Michael Amott’s guitars here, so hurrah to both of them for the solo.
The speed and power of the title track are superb and wonderfully old school heavy metal too. Ken Owen’s drumming here is powerful beyond belief, barrelling the song forwards. The melodic guitar passages evoke Maiden^^ and even Priest before it all goes a bit bouncing-apocalypse on you.
There are shades of Slayer at their most grandiose as opener ‘Buried Dreams’ unfurls its’ scaly wings. The long melodic guitar solo seems to have been beamed in from an entirely different record and it is just incredible, pacifying even. This and the bustling, caffeinated ‘Carnal Forge’ is exactly the type of music I and my Uruk-hai brothers listen to when we’re marching on a beautiful, defenceless Elven city intent on destruction.
Hypocritically, another thing I really like about Heartwork is the lack of fantasy, or horror lyrics hereabouts. There’s definitely more of a punk sensibility and sarcasm to the lyrics, a measure of the grindcore and hardcore scenes’ influence ; Jeff Walker having been an Electro Hippy and Bill Steer had been napalmed fatally. I like that, because it goes part and parcel with the focusing of the music, you don’t get an ‘out’ because they’re singing about the occult, this is the horror of the every day, the monstrous system we all feed and which feeds on us.
Bill Steer’s ‘Arbeit Macht Fleisch’ is a case in point (although whilst it isn’t flippantly made, I could do without the play on the Nazi slogan), the lyrics about being ground in the gears of the capitalist machine are great. It is probably the only song in the 1537 which contains the word ‘suzerain’, which is worth a bonus point or two.
Again on a lyrical tip, ‘Carnal Forge’ really puts the ‘fun’ in ‘funeral pyre’ with its eruption of tongue-twisting eschatological emanations. Much as I love a good song about the pointless horrors of war, I shan’t be getting these tattooed on my John Thomas any time soon
Multifarious carnage Meretriciously internecine Sublime enmangling steelbath Of escheated atrocities Enigmatic longanimity of ruminent mass graves Meritorious victory, into body-bags now scraped... Regnant fleshpiles The dead regorged Osculatory majestic wrath This carnal forge Desensitized - to perspicuous horror Dehumanized - fresh cannon fodder...
Another real favourite of mine is the slightly slower, but intent laden ‘Embodiment’ in which Carcass come out as not being totally in favour of organised religion. I know! Who’d have thought it?! In amidst all the grinding there are Van Halen guitar squeals and a very ‘clean’ rhythm track. I find it all utterly compelling.
I will spare you quite the full track by track on Heartwork as both you and it deserve better.
My copy is the 2021 reissue on blue vinyl which has a separate LP of demo versions with it. To my ears the demos sound much more like Carcass’ older stuff, far less alloyed and honed, far more of a rusty axe than the surgical steel they use here. I would argue though that the versions of the two last tracks on Heartwork, ‘Doctrinal Expletives’ and ‘Death Certificate’ definitely sound better as demos.
On the cusp of overstaying my welcome let me claw it back by heartily commending Heartwork to any waverers and (fellow) wusses out there. I absolutely love the concentrated power and fury of the album, who knew death metal could be like this?
Big kudos need to go to producer Colin Richardson too for filing the band’s sound down to such a sharp edge without losing power. The sound of the whole LP is immediate and ironically vital.
All hail our previous cat’s vet’s son’s band and I do hope Ken Owen is doing well.
1166 Down.
*to Mrs 1537 they were her English Literature teacher’s son’s band. By about 1997 they were our cat’s vet’s son’s band. These tangled webs, eh readers?
**which I’ve always thought looked like a primary school child’s art project on recycling; assembled using silver foil, cardboard, 2 gloves and the inside of a Hoover, all sprayed silver. Sorry H.R.
^okay big in their circles already, rightly so too for all their ferocity and innovation, but small fish in the overall metal scene.
^^hell ‘This Mortal Coil’ even gets their galllop-y gallop-y thing down pat.
No quite my zone, but always a good ride with you, Joe. Love the phrase “more of a rusty axe than the surgical steel”.
Just south of your zone, I’d wager! I really like how clinical and heavy this lot are – this really is the outer limits of my comfort zone too. Thanks Bruce.
Well, I had never heard of them, but reading the title was enough for me to know this was going to be a death metal post. I guess there aren’t many other genres that announce their presence as effectively via album titles and band names as this one.
Oh yes. carcass don’t have the usual spiky, unreadable logo though.
Fun to see some death metal here! Let’s have some more you big wuss. You’ll be listening to Suffocation before you know it… I find this whole Earache/Columbia era really fascinating though: how all these really extreme bands fared on major labels.
1993 was the same year Wolverine Blues came out too, that’s the other big one for me.