In the last couple of years, many Japanese goregrind bands like Pharmacist and Anatomical Amusements paid tribute to the classic old-school style of goregrind and I must say that FesterDecay somehow managed to harness its effort into the iteration. The opening song “Rotten Fester Decay” sets the tone for a filthy old-school reverb, the heavy sound riffs and the tremolo insertions encompass the grimy work of the guitar riffs and the pummeling drums. As a result of this rotten record, FesterDecay has spent considerable time developing its sound, which somehow evokes the classic style of the band’s General Surgery.

While the fourteen tracks deliver solid quality and sickening guttural growls and the blistering drums drag you along through rotten riffs, the next tracks like “Hash the Tongue” and “Fall in Grind” involve a putrid mix of sickening belching and regurgitating growls. You’ll notice that the songs are molded into different styles from the underground extreme genre like hardcore, death metal, and thrash metal. However, songs like “Disintegration of Organs” impressively give off the grimy septic vibes of dense riffs that perhaps sound very familiar to fans of the Japanese death/doom act Coffins.

The songs usually show variation in the tempos and upbeat drums on tracks like “Aborticide”, with the dense chugging riffs and blistering blast beats, had me on board. The gurgling growls, and the tempos bound to be as slow and the guitar maintaining the classic goregrind aspect. There’s an overall putridity to the festering riffs, but I would say that the guitars on the album take subtle shifts in the tempo without changing the tone of massive power chords. In my point of view, the songs might lack a blistering velocity despite the fact that FesterDecay seems to relish the modality of playing at a mid-tempo pace rather than peaking at briskly high speeds.

In this sense, the Japanese quartet throws some infectious riffs before washing you off with their grinding intensity. For example in the track “Stench of Decay” which is highlighted by the mid-paced groove and faster sections at the beginning of the song and the final minutes show the powerful formula. Though certain songs like “Psychopharmacist” deliver the classic elements of grindcore it somehow has a bit of the vicious style of classic Carcass albums such as “Reek of Putrefaction” and “Symphonies of Sickness”. The breakdowns and the powerful riffing on “From the Dark Tomb” have firm roots in the song structure and the ability to blend slower tempos and fast with a sound that is aggressive.

The songwriting does not detach itself from death metal but in fact, FesterDecay pieces them into a gigantic death/grind assault. With that being said the full-length album “Reality Rotten to the Core” sums up the extreme side of the eighties grindcore music, the song might lack the extremity or the technical guitar work. Albeit the band delivers a genuine style that can be described as sick and nauseating. In a number of songs like “Exposing the Skin Tissue” and “Carcasses’ Revenge” they veer into absolutely roller coasters of filthy regurgitation of putrid styled vocals showcasing heavy grooves, blast beats and a guttural cacophony.

The shortest track on the album is “Cryptic Wounds” and “Liquidized Gallbladder” which focuses on down-tuned guitars and fast-paced percussion. As with a lot of new modern grindcore bands, the Japanese modality seems more persistent, raw, and brutal and certainly acts like FesterDecay, Anatomical Amusements, and Pharmacist achieved what was absent in this sub-genre. The quartet has solidified the effort to sound primitive and aggressively repulsive. The remaining two tracks of the album “Scum’s Karma” and “Reconstruction of Malignant Miasma” offers a non-stop barrage of riffs extremely fast-paced drums and plenty of hardcore throwbacks to your face.

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