Review Summary: With this release Aborted prove that it is a little too early for a coroner's report on the band to come out.
It is not easy creating a good deathgrind album. You need to execute compositions at finger-blistering speeds while always maintaining a strong songwriting structure. Breakdowns and solos get squeesed to a virtual non-existence and if your riffs don't hold up to your speed, all you will end up with is a mediocre fast-paced death release. You have to think back to Fear of Napalm, third track from Terrorizer's stellar debut as a standard for generations to come: instantly groovy, brutal and fast.
When Aborted hit me over the head with this riffcraft carrier of an album I needed a long lie down to recuperate. Every track was memorable, different and above everything else - catchy. Guitars' level of distortion is perfect for this genre, they are sticking to you like gooey rotting zombie flesh in the inferno of nuclear apocalypse. Drums storm you with a wall of assault rifles precision. It's the SWAT team, cleansing the aftermath of the apocalypse. On occasional tracks you will even get a grenade explosion effect - I swear, a couple more listens and I will only be able to play this record pressed against a wall in the corner of a room with a rifle in my lap, oggling the window and the door expecting a pack of flesh-hungry zombies to break in at any moment.
Aborted do something rare for metal scene here - they have guest vocalists from bands Benighted, The Black Dahlia Murder, Rotten Sound and Misery Index on four tracks. I know this from the internet, because honestly, I never would have spotted them myself, despite the fact that I love and regularly rock out to all of these bands. You could blame my inept hearing, but a big part of the reason here is that Aborted's own frontman Sven de Caluwe has an impressive range and goes from ripping screams to low-pitch growls in a blink of an eye. To the extent that the whole album feels like it is performed by two vocalists and when the next guest growler does appear on a track my mind simply goes "well that is just another of Svencho's pitches".
While their immediate partners in crime Misery Index keep a steady foot in reality with occupy wall street and kill all thieves approach, Aborted stick to the tried and true gore aesthetics. It is no joke that one of the catchiest songs on Global Flatline is called Fecal Forgery immediately followed by Of Scabs and Boils. With the cover art, intro track and occasional gorey quote inserts you won't have to go a long way to imagine this as a sort of a concept album with the main themes being putrefaction, malignant ooze and global eredicating decay. The world as we know it is flatlining on us! Quick grab the pedals! Thank god we have Aborted to shock it back into life.
