The Rotted faced a dilemma; previously known as long-standing London extreme metal act Gorerotted, they went through some line-up changes and a shift in direction, and decided to re-brand themselves to the common contraction of their name for the release of latest album Get Dead Or Die Trying.
While the music itself may take the traditional extreme metal formula and expand it outward to encompass some (marginally) more approachable styles, there’s little sign of compromise in The Rotted’s lyrics – although they have consciously shifted away from “writing songs about murders [they]‘re never going to commit”, according to the press release. Unusually for albums like Get Dead Or Die Trying, Metal Blade have furnished us humble reviewers with the stories behind the songs in the words of the band themselves, and there’s little in the way of Gorerotted’s B-movie schlock horror approach of old.
But they’ve simply swapped the horror of bad B-movies for the self-confessed horrors of their own lives. While the cliché debaucheries of stadium rock acts – groupies, booze binges and so forth - are so familiar as to be meaningless, The Rotted’s more mundane tales of nihilistic hedonism and humdrum urban despair retain the power to shock a little, if only because they’re the sort of thing you or your friends have done already, just turned up way past eleven.
Hence Get Dead Or Die Trying has tracks like “Angel Of Meth”, a recollection of suicidal tour-bus hi-jinks fuelled by bad drugs and the temporary madness they engender; “Nothin’ But A Nosebleed”, a look back on a coke-stoked night of talking the talk followed by a morning after of being unable to walk the walk; and “Get Dead Or Die Trying” itself, which sums up The Rotted’s approach to life – basically, getting wasted to the detriment of your mortal existence as a way of coping with the bleakness of a postmodern consumer society.
Looked at in light of these lyrical influences, the grating guitars, cookie-monster vocals and road drill percussion of Get Dead Or Die Trying makes a certain amount of sense. While it shares a certain nihilistic ennui with grunge, grunge’s answer to the bad times was to turn its back and retreat into a warm cocoon of substances; The Rotted are evidently no strangers to leaping over the fence into la-la land, but they do it as a form of confrontation - a spitting-in-the-face of a world they despise, actively fronting up to it with clenched fists and narrowed eyes.
Get Dead Or Die Trying has its mellower moments, but they have a sense of the sore thumb about them. “A Brief Moment Of Regret” - a track that made the recent Topshop playlist, believe it or not – is a moody slow-paced instrumental of dark arpeggios that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Alice In Chains record, and the album closes with the bleakly atmospheric “28 Days Later”, another instrumental that captures the corpse-strewn emptiness of London in the film of the same name.
But The Rotted’s core business is brutal extremity, musically matching the turmoil of their lyrics with powerful and uncompromising grind that harks back to the lineage of Napalm Death and the other Earache artists of their ilk, albeit with fantastic instrument skills and a solid production job. Get Dead Or Die Trying is a challenge to the world and a challenge to the listener, and while it’s not the sort of thing I think I’d find myself listening to voluntarily, I have to give them their due respect for doing something more authentic than many other proponents of the style seem to manage. After all, as Shakespeare once wrote: “Hell’s empty; all the demons are here.”
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: death, extreme, Gorerotted, grind, metal, The Rotted, thrash
