Review by Carl on December 23, 2025.

Hold on tight to your undies, because there's something disturbingly vile and obscene oozing and blubbering this way, and no, it's not your uncle Jim for once, but the one-man army of Cadaverous Odour, which is an entity almost as vile-reeking and evil-sounding as the aforementioned uncle, probably.

The brains of the operation here is a man by the name Sasha Gallant, and what this good man has on offer for us is a bludgeoning dose of putrid and grime-encrusted death metal, cooked up by a formula that is very familiar, but goes down well nonetheless. The music on offer is a combination of slowly crawling and downtuned punishing crawl and bursts of primal pummeling velocity, with this combination being draped in a thick and heavily distorted veil of darkened atmosphere. When the foot is off the gas, Cadaverous Odour reminds me of the crawling yet bludgeoning approach that early 90's units such as Mythic, Cianide, and Demigod employed at their most glacial, sounding heavy as all fuck. These parts sound truly punishing, and when interspersed with the primitive bursts of grinding blasting in the vein of early Blood and Repulsion, there's certainly some welcome variation built into the nearly suffocating filth-ridden sound of the music. And while this may be a recipe that is a very familiar one these days, Cadaverous Odour does manage to inject something of a vibe of its own through the copious use of cool lead guitar work throughout, an aspect that sounds excellent within this concoction of old school underground-isms the band has going here. If only the low growling vocals had somewhat more variation going for them, that would've made it even better. Now they are just that bit too monotonous for my taste, but when viewed in the big picture, it's a criticism which is mostly negligible, honestly.

Because this is a compilation of demos, the sound quality does go up and down, something that is to be expected from a release such as this. It's, of course, no disaster; the volume of the music just varies in between the different recordings, luckily without ever deteriorating into grainy mush. Laudable is that everything sounds really natural and authentic throughout, without any plastic edges to the production and music, managing to truly maintain that delightfully grainy early 90's underground spirit this style of music so dearly needs. I wouldn't want it any other way, you know.

So there you have it, a death metal release that may be by the book for the most part, sounding really familiar throughout, but also truly succeeding in capturing that underground spirit you simply can't beat. And Cadaverous Odour does it while belting out a heavy combination of battering brutality and lurching crawl, with a tinge of dark atmosphere added.

Good stuff indeed!

Rating: 7.5 out of 10