Sweden’s REPUKED have all the right ingredients to cook up a smelly, twisted, worm-infested and brain draining Death Metal stew straight up from the AUTOPSY cook book, yet the right ingredients alone don’t always make a superb meal. And so is the case here. As much I love this sort of Death Metal, REPUKED seem to be missing that special something which makes the difference between bland and great album. In case I need to spell it out for you, it is an art of writing actual songs. It’s all fine to pay the respect to the masters of the genre, namely AUTOPSY, CARNAGE and DISMEMBER, but it just comes in from one ear and comes out from another without leaving any kind of long lasting impression. REPUKED know how to imitate their heroes pretty well, there are great moments of sick Death Metal and their songtitles make me feel warm inside (‘Chemically Wasted’, ‘Gag!’, ‘Standing By The Roadside…’, ‘… Fucking Something Dead’ and especially ‘Orgasmic Death Deliverer’), but after the album has finished playing I can’t remember any standout song. Well, except for ‘I Wanna Puke On You’ maybe. Aside from that it gets very boring very quickly. Of course, having listened to all REPUKED original inspirations for over 20 years makes it much harder for me to be impressed as easy as the dude who maybe discovered the genre a couple years ago, so bear that in mind, but for old schoolers among us I gotta say it’s just a quick fix of one-dimensional and quite forgetable Death Metal. They’ve got the sound right, now go and try to write some songs and go crazy on the drums for fuck’s sake, don’t be so predictable. I’d rather recommend you BONESAW, if you wanna hear some crazy AUTOPSY inspired Death Metal done right, as for REPUKED, maybe they just need to fester in that twising mass of burnt decay for a little bit longer, hehe. www.myspace.com/repuked, www.soulsellerrecords.com