#4: Horrid sounds of pig impalement

B as in... Bundled Bowels

I trace my love of death metal to my sophomore year of high school. One of my best friends, a guitar virtuoso named Darwin, started playing in a death metal band called Genital Grinder (named after the Carcass song). It didn’t stick, and later they opted for Biophobic, i.e., afraid of life.

I wasn’t that into the music, which remains the case today, but Biophobic began my love of the genre’s personality. They used a medical dictionary for all of their song titles: “Morbid Disembowelment,” “Carcinosis of the Cerebrum,” “Post Mortem Necrology,” “Coprophagic Kleptomaniac,” and “Suffering Acrotosism.” When I asked what “Coprophagic Kleptomaniac” meant, I was told, “a person who steals feces to eat it.” Genius.

Those five songs appear on Biophobic’s 1991 demo tape, Post Mortem Necrology, which is also the first time I was ever thanked on a release. Sort of. Darwin wasn’t there to submit his thanks list—each member got his own for some reason—so his bandmates threw one together for him. I’m listed as “Carl.”

The medical dictionary is also thanked.

When I started compiling the Year in Band Names at The A.V. Club, death metal offered—and offers—a bounty of material. In the nearly 15 years I’ve been cataloguing band names, few things have made me laugh harder than a video I found while assembling the belated 2014 edition.

On my list of contenders was a band called Dismembered Carnage. My searching took me to their YouTube page and a rambling nine-minute interview with two members of the band. Guitarist Joey Marks dominated the discussion, holding forth over how Dismembered Carnage’s upcoming album is “a lot of fucking evil, satanic, fucking mind-fuckin’ rape stuff, man.” Like the dude rocking the tiger-striped jumpsuit in Heavy Metal Parking Lot who proclaimed “Heavy metal rules—all that punk shit sucks,” Marks enthusiastically proclaims, “You’ll fuckin’ like it if you’re into old-school shit, unless you’re a fuckin’ poser, then you’re not gonna like it.” He goes on:

We’re rerecording a lot of old songs that we like and a lot of fans like: ‘Walking Autopsy,’ ‘Curbstomped,’ ‘Horrid Sounds Of Pig Impalement,’ and everybody’s favorite, fuckin’ ‘Rape The Priest.’ And yeah, we got a lot of new shit, man. ‘Sacrilegious Mindfuck,’ ‘Consume The Flesh Of Christ,’ ‘Aborted In Blasphemy,’ one of my favorites, ‘Morbid Molestation,’ and, uh fuck, dude, some evil shit. 

I wish I could link to the video here, but Dismembered Carnage took it down sometime after my enthusiastic recapping in the 2014 Year in Band Names. I hope correlation doesn’t mean causation, but I also understand if it does. Marks wasn’t trying to be funny, and the video showed he was deadly serious about the band’s music—so much so that a title like “Horrid Sounds of Pig Impalement” didn’t trip his chuckle alarms.

“Horrid Sounds” isn’t on Dismembered Carnage’s 2019 full-length, Blasphemed Betrayal. Although it’s a fan favorite, “Rape the Priest” doesn’t appear until track eight. More notable is how Dismembered Carnage opens Blasphemed Betrayal, with four straight songs about brutalizing Jesus: “As Jesus Burns,” “Denial of Christ,” “Your Lord Dismembered,” and “The Unholy Crucifixion.” A certain amount of that is to be expected considering the cover of the album, which depicts JC hanging from a tree:

Still, and not to get all Shakespearean, but Dismembered Carnage doth seem to protest too much. Not even your average Christian band opens an album with a tetralogy about Jesus. Granted, they have very different takes on the son o’ God, but Dismembered Carnage mentions him by name 35 times over the course of 32:50. That’s more than once per minute on average, and that doesn’t even include the 26 times they say “Christ” or reference “lord.” (To be fair, “Lord” is also an honorific for Satan, Dismembered Carnage’s preferred deity.) Again, Christian bands don’t even hit those numbers!

I have these figures because I ran Blasphemed Betrayal’s lyrics through a word-cloud generator, which helpfully tabulated them for me:

Or, to put it visually:

Not every generator could handle all the blasphemed betrayals:

“Blasphemy body all rape eternally unholy Christianity suffering agony deranged” may as well be a line from one of the album’s songs. Perhaps “Fester in the Grave”?

All that said… “rape” 41 times? Unfortunately, misogyny runs rampant in extreme metal. Some bands get particularly graphic in their lyrics, but Dismembered Carnage doesn’t actually mention women much. Half of the 41 rapes occur in “Rape the Priest,” whose talk of anal penetration makes it more homoerotic than anything.

Dismembered Carnage is more prone to generic provocations like “Rape those who worship the holy savior” (“The Unholy Crucifixion”) and “Rape the nuns and feast on their blood” (“Denial of Christ”). While those lyrics won’t soundtrack any first dances at wedding receptions, they’re pretty restrained for the genre. Death metal de rigueur.

That doesn’t excuse misogyny, of course. And it should be noted that Blasphemed Betrayal has a naked woman getting speared by a demon on its cover. But hey, can any band that sells “Sexy Woman Panties” on its site really be misogynist?

Well, yeah. Obviously.

POST-SCRIPTS

• Darwin and I ended up starting a punk band together our senior year that originally went by Schooled Stupid, a name I still love. We remain friends, and he still shreds.

• While death metal never became my thing, I did get excited when Napalm Death came to the AVC office to do Undercover—and play one of their songs, because they didn’t understand the concept of the series. I was too intimated by Shane Embury to ask him to sign my copy of Harmony Corruption.

• While it’s not as amusing as that original interview video, you can watch Dismembered Carnage play “Morbid Molestation” at a sports bar in their hometown on YouTube. They’re all shirtless for some reason.