Internationally speaking ODIOUS MORTEM is still a pretty unknown four piece hailing from Santa Cruz, California that has just delivered its debut full length “Devouring The Prophecy” via Unique Leader Records. But considering the quality of the records that the label is constantly releasing their name will certainly be established rather quickly as well. Unfortunately I never heard their one and only four song demo effort (“Gestation Of Worms”, which was recorded in December of 2003), so I can’t really tell you whether the band has progressed rather drastically ever since or not. Fact is that only one of the demo tunes (‘Morton’s Neuronoma’) made it on the album now and that ODIOUS MORTEM have become a totally impressive, brutal musical unity nowadays. It’s even more astonishing if you find out that “Devouring The Prophecy” was already recorded more than a year ago (in March 2004) when the band was obviously still lacking a permanent bassplayer and vocalist / guitarist Dan Eggers also took care of that (in the meantime Joel Horner has become responsible for those duties)… The ten featured tracks on the disc, that are not even reaching a playing time of half an hour, are filled with so many twisted and sick guitar parts and a constantly pushing, yet very varied performed drumming, that you are left rather breathless right after nevertheless! The vocals are of the lowest, guttural kind and totally fit into this apocalyptic inferno while ODIOUS MORTEM as a whole is obviously heavily impressed by the more technical hordes in brutal Death Metal, such as NECROPHAGIST, GORGUTS, PAVOR and the likes. But unlike many of them, ODIOUS MORTEM don’t loose themselves in extremely complex songstructures and tons of breaks… they just incorporate their musical weirdness into an extremely brutal, fast forward way of writing. And that probably still makes them so exciting, even to those of you who can’t stand technical Death Metal at all! So, all in all a very cool debut offering, produced very professionally and packaged with more godly artwork by Mr. Jon Zig again. For all further info check out www.odiousmortem.com or www.uniqueleader.com