Album Reviews : Severe Torture – Slaughtered

There’s a great song title on Severe Torture’s Sworn Vengeance called ‘Fight Something’ which really sums up their extreme twist on death metal. This is a violent soundtrack ideal for punching things. Not necessarily someone, but some thing… like a tree.

Severe Torture took a giant leap forward with their aforementioned 2007 release. Every album from this band has been an improvement on the previous album and that pattern continues with Slaughtered. Sworn Vengeance was a tour de force and still gets air time with me three years after its release. However, with their new album you can see they’re just a little bit older and wiser, a little bit better at what they do, the structure of the songs is more developed and production is exceptional.

Slaughtered is packed tight with crushing riff after crushing riff, the lead breaks are first-rate (check out the solo on the title track – it’s worth the price of admission alone). Seth Van De Loo at the back is one of the leaders in his field. His double kick attacks are relentless without being over the top.

The rough, throaty vocals of Dennis Schreurs are intense. However, the vocals also present my only concern with this album. On Sworn Vengeance he experimented with some mid-range stuff in a few passages which sounded awesome. The tone was good, it provided a bit of variety and I was looking forward to some more of that on this album, perhaps even a higher ratio. But, unfortunately he abandoned the mid-range vocals all together for Slaughtered.

The masterstroke with Slaughtered (also with Vengeance for that matter) is the length of the songs and the album as a whole. Severe Torture exercise a straight-to-the-point approach with songs about three or four minutes in length and the album about 35 minutes in total – the prefect duration for a death metal album. Standout track is “Unholy Misconception” – 3:30 minutes of pure death metal brilliance. The super heavy mid-tempo ‘Inferior Divinity’ is also pretty fucking awesome.

It’s a great studio release but this kind of brutality needs to be heard live so let’s hope Slaughtered brings Severe Torture to our shores in the near future. 8.5/10

Band: Severe Torture
Album: Slaughtered
Year: 2010
Genre: Brutal death metal
Origin: Netherlands
Label: Season of Mist/Riot!
http://www.myspace.com/severetorture

Track listing:
1. Grave Condition
2. Unholy Misconception
3. Deride Jesus
4. Defective Fornication
5. Slaughtered
6. Feeding On Cadavers
7. Inferior Divinity
8. Incarnation Of Impurity
9. To Relieve The Mortal Flesh Of Pain
10. Swallowing Decay

Reviewed by Pete Williams