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Not content with sloshing around in critical froth as drummer with thrash renegades Power Trip, Chris Ulsh has restarted Mammoth Grinder to remind everybody what proper, red-blooded, Neanderthal death metal sounds like. The band’s first album in nearly five years, Cosmic Crypt feels like one single, sustained rush of barbarous sludge: the squalid grotesqueries of Autopsy given a sideways upgrade and double-dipped in Lovecraftian turmoil. Songs like Human Is Obsolete veer from snail’s-pace dismay to a raging, punked-up clatter, as if 30 years of evolution in death metal have been entirely ignored and Death’s Zombie Ritual still remains the ultimate benchmark. Which, in a very real sense, it probably is. Meanwhile, the vicious Locusts Nest could easily be mistaken for a Ribspreader out-take, were it not so utterly filthy in sonic tone and gloriously slack-jawed in execution.
