The Portugese black metal duo Defuntos released their debut album of doomy, damaged slime back in 2007 on the German label True Face Of Evil, but I only found out about this band a short while ago. This was their first album, a cd reissue of a limited edition cassette that the band released on their own label, and since this came out Defuntos has followed it up with another album that came out late last year, but I haven't been able to track that one down yet in order to pick some up for C-Blast. For the moment, though, we have their debut, Sangue Morto, a death-obsessed slab of damaged blackened doom, or doomy black metal, definitely falling somewhere in between the two but suffering some severe brain trauma that sets this off in that special corner of blackened metal reserved for brilliantly fucked bands like Furze, Abruptum, Tjolgtjar, Wormsblood, Striborg, Emit and Funereal Moon. Abruptum is a definite comparison to what Defuntos are doing, there's a similiar mixture of anguished wordless moans and rapturous chanting, stumbling doomy drums and primitive riffs, dungeon ambience and clanking industrial sounds and a general diseased atmosphere that soaks into these seven tracks, which opens with a good two minutes of nothing but primitive tribal drumming and feedback. Riffs stagger and stumble and sometimes go nowhere, songs often do the same, stopping or starting in weird spots, and part of their stripped-down, murky sound is owed to the fact that Defuntos don't use a guitar. All of the riffs are played on a bass, giving their music a skeletal, minimal quality that makes it all the more eerie and strange sounding. Unlike Abruptum, however, Defuntos also like to rock, and often they break into a pounding midtempo riff or garagey blackened punk dirge hammered into a hypnotic groove, but that tends to collapse into a heap of subterranean bass and percussive clatter before they ever reach any kind of objective. It's a mess, but a gloriously nihilistic, zonked-out mess that comes off like a cross between some kind of deformed doomed blackpunk and classic Abruptum, and clearly highly recommended!