I reviewed a compilation cd here last year called Doomed To Death Damned In Hell that featured exclusive material from three Japanese doom-death bands. That compilation (which we still have in stock) was an awesome collection of fucked-up, ultra-heavy deathsludge that not only delivered some exclusive jams from one of my favorite current death metal bands, Coffins, but also introduced me to two bands that I immediately fell in love with, the sickening graveyard sludge of Grudge, and the wasted Frost-worship of Anatomia, who featured members of the cult Japanese death metal band Transgressor.

I've been keeping my eyes peeled for more stuff from both of those bands ever since, and while I haven't been able to find much else from Grudge, I finally located this 10" vinyl release from Tokyo's Anatomia. This limited edition EP came out on Nuclear War Now! and is actually a reissue of Anatomia's 2003 demo, with four tracks of warped, spaced-out deathsludge and a bonus cover of Repulsion's "Splattered Cadavers" that was previously unreleased. Like most of the other Japanese death/doom bands that I listen to, there's something vaguely weird about Anatomia's music. It's obviously rooted in early Celtic Frost and primitive American death metal, but there's that special x-factor that makes this more than just another blurt of slow-mo death metal. The riffs are stripped down, simple and plodding and heavy as fuck, but the guitarist is prone to veer into weird angular riffs while the bassist accompanies him with these odd dissonant basslines. The drumming, on the other hand, is totally barbaric, just lumbering sludgy dirges and splattery slo-mo double-kick thunder, and the vocals spew ragged vomitous roars across Anatomia's fetid sludge. Clouds of dank reverb drift through the recording, and smears of grimy dark ambience appear in between songs. The lyrics are indecipherable gore-soaked hallucintations, songs like "Morgue Of Cannibalism", "Funeral Feast" and "Drowned In Sewage" all speak for themselves, and the record artwork is awesome, with horrific Chris Moyen-esque visions of victims being consumed by amorphous corpse-blobs. Crushing, filthy, totally awesome death-dirge insanity along the lines of Coffins, early Incantation at their slowest, Autopsy, Grudge, etc.