Review of the Album "Ritual Zombi" by Spanish Death Metal Band Avulsed

Ritual Zombi is the 6^th studio album by Madrid Spain’s death metal band Avulsed and right away you can notice that the word zombie is misspelled or spelled differently perhaps to get a point across. Whatever the case might be, these guys have been bringing music fans some brutal yet melodic extreme death metal since 1991 and this is a strategy that has worked out. Even though Avulsed may be Spain’s best death metal band, some kinds of death metal may get stale after a while and this may be the case even with these guys but the technicality is still present.

Songs such as “…Was Not My Blood” start out with a bass line, the heaviness may be too much for some to handle. Z Hunter is a very good fast song and stylistically would have been similar to the band’s 1999 album called Stabwound Orgasm. Anyhow, Z Hunter is a song that lyrically addresses the extinction of the human race as they come back to life as zombies. A zombie can also be described as someone that’s just slowly going through the motions of life and unable to react quick enough to the circumstances of life.

"Horrified by Repulsion" is a slow, heavy death metal song about going after humans and the song is like something that we would have heard on Arch Enemy’s debut album called Black Earth as the heaviness of the guitar tone dominates even as the song speeds up.

When we get to the song called “Elegy for the Rotting” this display of acoustic guitar excellence would make Andres Segovia very proud! This is stylistically similar to a classical guitar tune or like Sacred Reich’s “If Only” song back in 1993. Fast forward 20 years to 2013 and an extreme death metal band gets softer if only for a brief moment.

“Brainsuck” then goes back to the same hard hitting, extreme musical moments we hear from Avulsed (pretty typical right)? There is a modern version of the song called Zombie Ritual covered by Avulsed and clearly the modern guitar kicks in and you can tell by the tone of it. The other noticeable difference in this version is that instead of Chuck Schuldiner’s more raspy style of vocals there is the guttural, lower vocals of David Sanchez Gonzalez. As usual though, the song titles are very graphic and grotesque even for an extreme metal band and this may be one of the few drawbacks for Avulsed as a band.

Ritual Zombi ends with another instrumental song called Devoured and Forgotten which starts with some agonizing voices before the guitars kick in. Is this album better than their 1999 album? Tough to tell but it certainly is better than anything they may have released in the first decade of the 21^st century.