Grab a bottle of sake, a fat bag of dirtweed, and pump your skull full of the sickest Japanese death sludge to be found with this awesome new three-way split CD from the Italian label Grindmind. Doomed To Death, Damned In Hell is the name of the album, and it's the fucking ultimate in gory, detuned doomy death, with each of the three Tokyo bands featured delivering their own unique style of super downtuned, bestial, doomic death metal. Two of the bands were new to me, Anatomia and Grudge, but Coffins are one of my favorite death metal bands ever, so their inclusion on this disc made it essential for me from the start.

Anatomia from Tokyo start the disc with five tracks of mostly midpaced death metal, a power trio a la Coffins, with members of the cult Japanese deathdoom band Transgressor playing gruesome, reverb-heavy death with impossibly gutteral, drooling grunts, droning minor key riffing, boiling double bass drumming, and awesome sludgy breakdowns. No lyrics are included but it's obvious that their songs are hardcore gore hallucinations with titles like "Necrcannibal Instinct", "Mournful Cremation" and the hysterical "Severed Infant Waste". They keep things interesting too, with weird metal percussion sounds hooking up with the pounding drumming. Think Incantation, Autopsy, Winter, Celtic Frost, you get the idea. Awesome, slow dirgey death metal primitivism.

Grudge were the one big surprise on this disc. Like Anatomia, Grudge hail from Tokyo and this was my first exposure to the band, and I was completely fucking blown away by their four songs on here. Ungodly heavy, Grudge's brand of evil, massively downtuned sludge almost reaches Corrupted-like levels of decimation, with glacial subsonic riffs oozing over their strangely ramshackle drumbeats, the double bass rolls and massive tom beats bashed out in a super sloppy attack that at times almost sounds inept and off-time but which makes the songs sound that much more barbaric and monstrous. But it's the vocals that really make my fuckin' hair stand on end...Grudge's singer sounds like the guy was freshly exhumed from the grave before they stuck him in the studio to record these jams. Much of the time, the vocals are gutteral howls blasted with FX, but he also lets loose with these awesome, ghoulish moans, wailing utterances and wordless rasps that sound like something right out of an Asian horror movie. The combination of stumbling, sloppy percussion, diseased sludge and distinctly Japanese sounding zombie howls give Grudge a really nasty graveyard vibe. Awesome stuff, you can bet that I'm going to be trying to track down more stuff from these guys post haste.

And then we're on to Coffins, with four new tracks of gnarly, midtempo death metal sludge, super noisy and distorted and blown out, the guitars tuned way WAY down and cranked on the midrange, a filthy razorblade tone that infects their brutal atavistic DM riffing. Blasting midpaced doublebass and pounding dirgey beats and downtuned bass, awesome fucked-up Hanneman style soloing, gurgling gutteral vomit roars. Three original tracks, "Abysmal Blood Sea", "Cremated Remains" (one of the slowest Coffins jams ever !!), "Stillbirth", and a cover of the Asphyx jam "Wasteland Of Terror". Think Corrupted meets Autopsy meets Celtic Frost. Devestating!

Three of the heaviest death sludge bands from Tokyo, gathered together on one monstrous disc, with amazing artwork from Rafal Kruszyk depicting biomechanical gasmask horrors, skull mounds, and undead wraiths.