Review Summary: It's filthy, it's heavy, it's not even remotely complex. In short, it's awesome.
There's a great juxtaposition in having a band name as comically vile as "Hymen Holocaust" with an album title that is the Latin translation of "Til Death Do Us Part." It brings to mind a knuckle-dragging kind of band that's got a little more going on under the hood than you'd think at first blush. The fact that the album cover isn't the standard overly disgusting fare helps support that impression.
You know what? That's about right.
The album starts off with an odd little sample that sounds like it's from the soundtrack of an old movie, and that's because it is. The whole of DMNS is peppered with samples from a 1980s pulp horror flick called Cannibal Ferox (or Make Them Die Slowly in the US), and this is the only movie that gets sampled throughout. Like the album it's attached to, Cannibal Ferox is more interested in showing off its gory special effects and shocking the audience than it is telling a coherent story, but sometimes that's the point. You're looking for something that punches you in the gut, not one that tickles your cerebrum.
Musically, Hymen Holocaust peddles in the same type of goregrind as The Last Days of Humanity or The Day Everything Became Nothing, that is to say low-tuned guitars that make groovy but rather indistinct rhythms, pitch-shifted vocals that sound inhuman, and programmed drums. It's worth mentioning that this is a one-man band, not because the compositions are so complex that it's unbelievable one person did it all, but rather that there's a really impressive cohesion to the songs that give the impression that Morris really understands how the instruments should fit together and how songs (and albums) should progress.
Production-wise, the sound is thick and buzzsaw as it gets. It brings to mind Mortician if they didn't intentionally overdrive the sound to the point of clipping. For my peeps who have done recording, you can tell these guitars went straight into the board instead of being done with amplifiers, and that's not a bad thing. It creates this oppressive sound that manages not to be too bottom heavy nor too ear piercing. The bass is full, the drums are meaty and powerful, and it's the kind of album that sounds great at low volumes and sounds even better at high (Putrid Pile, you could learn a thing or two).
The songs themselves aren't too easy to distinguish, as is standard fare. It's pretty rare for the guitars to drift above the bottom two strings or more than about 7 frets up the neck, but HH manages to give each one its own little flavor that prevents the album from feeling monotonous. Added in with the samples that go between songs and it starts to feel like one big journey that takes a few twists and turns but keeps within the same motif (much like the river of Cannibal Ferox itself). There's an absolutely amazing moment at the second half of Wanking Down Memory Lane where a delicate little keyboard lick matches with heavy as hell guitars that I look forward to every time I spin it up.
In short, there's nothing terribly new on DMNS, but everything it does is so damn good that insofar as goregrind goes it's hard to find any faults within it. I stay with a 4 because I doubt anyone who dislikes this style will be won over, but anyone who even has a mild interest in the genre could find this on their steady rotation.
A special shout out to the very last track, also. The shortest on the album at barely over a minute long, it's also the most frenetic, and gives the whole thing such a great cap-off that I felt like mentioning it.
