Although they never achieving the same level of legendary status as Chris Reifert's previous band Autopsy, Abscess were an amazingly weird and heavy outfit that has been cranking out a demented cross between barbaric death metal slime and psychedelic sludgepunk since the mid-90's, releasing a couple of crucial discs on Relapse before moving on to UK label Peaceville for their last few releases. I actually hadn't paid much attention to their last couple of releases since Peaceville titles had been hard for me to track down for a while, but their latest album Dawn Of Inhumanity caught my attention immediately once I heard some of the preview tracks and laid my eyes on Dennis Dread's spectacularly wonky album artwork, a wild looking vision of levitating cloaked cultists, occult symbolism, and demonic alien-eyeball beasts. If you�re a fan of the older Abscess stuff, you know what to expect here; the songs on Dawn are in the same vein as previous Abscess offerings, an offbeat mix of caveman death metal, hardcore punk, Sabbathy doom, and crazed acid-guitar freakouts that crawl and lurch through a dank cloud of sewer ambience, with weirdo riffing and Voivod-esque skronk appearing alongside their punky blasts of guttural down tuned crush and primitive thrash. Their sound is heavy enough for Autopsy fans, but Abscess are so much weirder, the songs often wandering into bizarre noise freak outs (such as �The Rotting Land�, where the guys from Darkthrone can be heard gibbering and grunting within a chaotic free-noise mess), fucked-up tribal psychedelic death murk, even layering acoustic guitars within an otherwise roaring blast of rocking mid-paced death metal, and Reifert's vocals wheeze and grunt through a myriad of delay and echo effects that gives all of this a bent, cough-syrup covered vibe. Along with Dread's killer album art, the booklet that comes with Dawn is also filled with additional artwork from Reifert himself, who creates nightmarish primitive visions of black and red demons that somewhat resembles Mike Diana's artwork. It stinks that this turned out to be the band's final album, as they announced that the band was being put to rest soon after the release of Dawn Of Inhumanity, but they left on a high note with one of the year's wackiest death metal albums that continues to blare out of my stereo on a regular basis. Recommended!