Track Premiere: Cartilage – “The Sanguine Fiend”
Sanguine for The Sanguine Fiend!
Do you like Bay Area deathgrind? If your answer to that is no, then please fight me out back at your earliest convenience. But if you are not about to catch these hands, then allow me to present to you a morsel of malice and malignancy. Studied in the ways of those who treaded the path before them such as Carcass and Exhumed, San Francisco’s Cartilage bring their own flavor to the gory gathering.
Razor-sharp riffs, pummeling percussion, and a dual gurgle/shriek vocal attack are nothing novel, but on “The Sanguine Fiend” we are treated to thrashy technicality and constant shifts in tempo. For a brisk 3-minute offering, there are more ideas tastefully inserted than most tracks double thay length. The track is best described by vocalist Mark Walace with:
“Symposium slathering selfish surgeon’s symbols strewn sequentially in this sinister serial slasher hymn titled “The Sanguine Fiend”
A loquacious layman of the leud and low-brow? Doubtful as the song rips and renders with meaty riffs hooks, acting as just one part of the greater story told on the album Operating Altar, which chronicles “…Matthew Krolmark’s descent into medical madness with a single, sprawling Deathgrind opus: faster than a panicked heartbeat, sharper than Dr. Warwick Locke’s questionable scalpel, and dripping with enough gore to violate several ethical boards.” A gore concept album? Surely it is more than enough to become a fiend for.
Cartilage‘s 3rd LP Operating Altar releases on September 11 via Everlasting Spew.
