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Welcome to 2009, hope all your holidays went well.

Anyway, back to the ‘ol Metal Monday feature that almost no one but me loves. I was going to do a Saint Vitus entry until I realized there were no good Vitus records for sale right now, and then I found this lost Finnish nugget:

Necropsy - Never to Be Forgotten 7″ on my favorite, Seraphic Decay records.

This one is absolute head-spinning death metal insanity. Real skull crushing power, that just lends itself to my theory that Finland is the most brutal death metal locale in Europe. First of all the vocals on this one are just absolutely first rate growling, throat shredding, and evil. Reminds me a bit of Johnny Hedlund from Unleashed, or at least in the same ballpark. Very deep but still very full and expressive sounding, not at all the kind of whispered gurgling employed by bands much shittier than this.

Musically Necropsy kind of tow the typical Finnish line which is a little bit darker/less melodic version of the typical Swedish/Euro death metal sound. Probably the best known of this style is Amoprhis (and their precursor Abhorrence), so if you know them picture a bit rougher version of that. Another thing that sets Necropsy apart for me is that their blasts are noticeably quite fast, although there isn’t a ton of blast beats on here, when they do use them they really dig in at top speed. Some of their earlier recordings made a little bit more use of blast beats and were a bit more influenced (at least in the drumming) by grind bands of the day.

Necropsy never managed a proper lp release, which is a goddamn shame, because I think it would have solidified them as a major contender in their day. They do have a split lp with Demigod (another of the Finnish greats), also on Seraphic Decay, and a slew of great demos which REALLY should get the discography treatment sometime before the end of this decade. Anyway, Never To Be Forgotten is one of the few records on Seraphic Decay that doesn’t look like a total bootleg (has a 2 color sleeve, and isn’t pressed on scrap vinyl), although from an email I got from one of the guitar players not too long ago, the “label” never bothered to actually give the band copies of it.