Was never much of a fan of the whole "slam" sound that emerged in death metal towards the latter half of the 90s, save for a couple of bands whose inherent weirdness or insanity distinguished them from the hordes of sub-Suffocation clones that sprouted up across the globe. While I'm all for mindless brutality in metal, most of the stuff in this vein leaves me cold, and comes across as far too formulaic for my tastes. Go back to the early days before "slam" became a thing, though, and you'll dig up some genuinely odd death metal that was particularly extreme for the time. Declared by some as one of the progenitors of this style, Long Island, NY band Afterbirth puked up a small but influential body of work in the early 90s that would later be cited as one of the first bands to produce this combination of monstrous misshapen grooves, fucked-up ultra-guttural vocals and complex arrangements. Some C-Blast followers might recognize member Cody Drasser, who in recent years has produced dark droneological noisescapes with his Caulbearer project, but here he helped to unleash a putrid assault of demented discordant riffery and crushing slower tempos fronted by the utterly unintelligible guttural fumes of singer Matt Duncan. With just a demo, Afterbirth introduced a deranged variant of New York death metal with an extreme vocal style that was really only comparable to what Demilich were doing; in his liner notes to this collection, Internal Bleeding's Frank Rini describes these vocals as "the most guttural and brutal that I had ever heard", and Duncan's delivery definitely sounds less like it came from a human throat and more from a rabid animal trapped in a culvert. It sticks out as one of the more insane death metal vocal performances from that period.

    During their brief run in the early 90s, Afterbirth only released that one demo and a rehearsal tape, all of which was collected and re-mastered for Foeticidal Embryo Harvestation, rounded out by a couple of live tracks. The main attraction is the Psychopathic Embrytomy demo from 1994, which blows four chunks of emetic, fucked-up death metal with songs like "Obliteration Of Human Tissue" and "Obstetric Bastardization". The sound quality is actually pretty good for a demo tape from this time period, and it's certainly heavy as hell, the songs erupting into tangles of colossal chromatic riffing and dissonant shred, smeared with those insanely guttural belched vocal noises. The songs shift spastically between bursts of violent blastbeat tempos and barbaric thrash and those slower, sludgy grooves and doom-laden passages that would prove to be a seminal influence on the nascent "slam" sound, with catchy riffs and an oddly flanged bass sound and unusual playing style (slap bass techniques, odd melodies) that's frequently pushed to the front of the mix.

    The bands 1993 Rehearsal Demo is also pretty interesting, featuring earlier versions of the demo tracks (as well as an exclusive track "Rebirth") laced with snippets of horror film soundtrack music; the sound quality on this recording is naturally pretty raw, but Afterbirth sounded even more bizarre and brutal here, a ramshackle blast of murky, glottal horror that's a bit more frenzied and chaotic compared to the demo. The rest of the disc is rounded out by some soundboard recordings taken from shows in New York and Rhode Island, and feature later material that didn't appear on the demos, tracks like "Saving The Dead", "Crematorial Gates" and "Fleshwound" that pointed towards a more abrasively atonal direction that the band seemed to be taking prior to breaking up, and which potentially hint at a somewhat Gorgutsian brand of sickening discordant violence.

    Comes in digipack packaging.