Crushing death metal collides with spacey prog/fusion on this new album from Beheaded Zombie, whose goofy gore-flick name almost fools you into thinking that this is just another splattergrind abortion. Out on Bad Mood Man,a Russian label that we usually follow for all of the weird Slavic doom metal and dark ambience that they typically put out, so this stuck out like a sore thumb when I checked out the label's latest batch of releases. Beheaded Zombie aren't as "tech" as a lot of the stuff in this scene, and is in fact pretty old school with the crushing, cold chromatic riffing and bilious bestial throatshred, and the production is on the raw side, giving this the required heft and thickness without too much polish. But the jazz fusion guitar lines and spacey, chorus-heavy guitar textures that they blend into their death metal puts this in the same category as Spheres-era Pestilence, Atheist, early Candiria, Alarum and early Cynic, but with their own unique, melodic touch. Crushing riffs are contaminated with weird Mahavishnu fusion/prog, the harsh vokills are delivered in guttural gargles, the occasional deep chanting in Russian will sometimes appear and weird things out even more, and dark melodic leads snake through the tricky time signatures and sudden, jarring rhythmic shifts; the bassist really stands out on the album, too, playing some highly convoluted bass lines that are out in front and evenly match the guitars, and he's not bashful about ripping into an extended bass solo, either. There's this odd psychedelic quality to their mutant death metal that's a little hard to describe; it's all as demented and prog as the early 90's experimental death metal bands that these guys are obviously influenced by, but they inject these oddball melodies (which are actually sort of pretty) that definitely contribute towards their own signature sound. The artwork for Happiness For All is pretty strange for a death metal album as well, with twisted neon cartoon illustrations, and the text all printed in Cyrillic. Pretty wicked stuff, highly recommended for fans of wonky, prog-damaged death metal!