The Ultimate Review of Surgical Steel

<p id="reviewText_165262">For someone just recovering from the severe brain concussion their first few albums gave me, the cover art to <i>Surgical Steel</i> certainly came off as unusually 'clean' to me when you look at their debut or sophomore albums, both featuring some of the nastiest cover arts the metal scene has ever seen. I just didn't quite know what to think of it. Granted, I didn't really know much about Carcass around this point in time and for all I knew this was just their latest album and that's it. Little did I know of that this is actually a supposed "come back" after the band went on hiatus in 1996 not much later after they released their then-swansong effort fittingly named <i>Swansong</i>.<br />
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As it seemed, <i>Surgical Steel</i> was supposed to be some sort of <i>Heartwork</i> meets <i>Symphonies/Necroticism</i> release with the gore lyrics that were so recognizable from the band in the late 80's. Let's think for a moment, <i>Heartwork</i>...gory lyrics...<i>Symphonies/Necroticism</i>, yeah that definitely sounds like a cash grab to me. If you're planning to release an album with all that made the band so famous in the early days, you can bet your ass that the final product is going to be some kind of watered-down album with overemphasis on everything that made them the act they are. And what do you know? <i>Surgical Steel</i> happens to be <i>exactly</i> that. The fact that Carcass themselves for years claimed a comeback was highly unlikely, and that this 'highly unlikely comeback' was released on Nuclear Blast says a lot about why <i>Surgical Steel</i> was even conceived in the first place ($$$). Everything from this album screams cash grab. <i>Everything</i>. This is about as "checklist" as albums get, and the ridiculously high levels of production polish further explain what the fuck Carcass were thinking with this. And I haven't even begun to talk about the lyrics yet...<br />
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And should I? My god they're abhorrent, as in worse than most nu metal lyrics. What we get here is some kind of watered-down juxtaposed mess of infantile "gore ftw" lyrics and poser attitudes that feel wholly out of place on a Carcass album. Whether it's the retarded bashing of posers and hipsters on "Thrasher's Abattoir", the suicide-inducing "BLOODLUSTMORD" on "Cadaver Pouch Conveyor System" or the generic stadium rock singalong chorus from "The Granulating Dark Satanic Mills", it's all just actively fucking terrible and annoying. I can feel my IQ steer into the negative numbers once I hear Jeff Walker vomiting his awful lines into the microphone. It just reeks of commercial whoredom, and the attempts at being emotional found on some of these tracks don't work even a hair better instead of just further solifidying the "money whore" status this album had already rightfully pasted on it.<br />
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<i>Surgical Steel</i> sounds like a more grindy <i>Heartwork</i>, but comparing this trainwreck to their melodeath masterpiece feels like an insult to the latter. <i>Heartwork</i> had genuine meaning to it, it showed a band experimenting with newly-found elements to create an emotionally lasting record with catchy hooks and more of a rock-ish vibe than what they released prior to 1993. <i>Surgical Steel</i> was said to combine everything that made their previous output good, but I actually feel Carcass don't quite have the same idea of what was good about their music as we have. In what's probably a deliberate effort to make things more accessible, Carcass have taken the most banal things you can imagine and crammed it into a record that stands so far away from what characterized the band before that this simply sounds like a completely different band. <i>Surgical Steel</i> has the benefit of having some catchy hooks, but everything build around what good this record contains feels like lazy, self-parodying and filler material that the band wrote to check the "long songs just like <i>Necro</i>" box from the checklist.<br />
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This is incredibly lifeless, there's not a glimmer of inspiration or originality to be found here. Everything is just blatant self-parody to the point where this album turns into some kind of overextended bore session basically made to annoy the shit out of you considering a good 40 minutes of this record suck far beyond logical terms. None of the songs here can be defined as even "mediocre", but song 5 and 6 have some pretty catchy hooks that stay in your head, yet only further proving how unmemorable this record is as the rest provides no replay value whatsoever. This has some pretty busy leads from time to time, but it's staggering just how unnoticed this manages to pass by, most of this can probably be blamed on the incredibly generic stadium rock leads and solos that do jackshit to identify themselves as Carcass-written guitar "licks".<br />
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<i>Surgical Steel</i> has <i>Phantom Antichrist</i> levels of production polish. Any words that remotely have something to do with "distortion" do not appear in Colin Richardson's dictionary here, because this is so glossy that it almost blinds your eyes. I have heard pop rock songs with more crunch to the guitars and I would have never thunk that I were to ever call a drum kit generic. But <i>Surgical Steel</i> does wonders here, it actually manages to make a drum kit sound unoriginal. The performance itself is solid if not a little (read shitload) bland, but the incredibly simple and standard sound of the kit makes it all sound so lazy. I'm on the verge of falling asleep on top of my keyboard whenever I'm forced to think about how incredibly boring this whole monstrosity sounds. It helps that Jeff Walker at least has <i>some</i> of his old vigor left, but the generic "gore/emotional" lyrics he spews forth drag his performance down to downright hideous levels of suck.<br />
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This very album is the epitome of a sellout. It shows a band watering down their formula to such levels it verges on nu-metalcore in how clueless it sounds. Everything from <i>Surgical Steel</i> cries cashgrab; it brings absolutely NOTHING new to the table and emphasizes on everything the band were once good at, but decides to strip it down so far that it sounds like a completely different band playing terrible poser metal. Also, that "BLOODLUSTMORD" had me on the verge of a severe emotional breakdown, but I figured that tears weren't the answer, so I pressed skip, and then I pressed skip again, and again..and then a few times again, and then the record started over for some reason...and then I just sat there, wondering what the hell ever happened. God, I need a fucking beer...and some aspirins.</p>
<p>Final Score: 19 / 100</p>