Whoretopsy hail from Australia, where apparently it’s acceptable to sing about dismembering your partner if you catch them cheating on you. Which is cool, especially if it’s done in a nice brutal death metal style.
Never Tear Us Apart is their second full album and it’s deliciously evil. Whereas your more traditional bands focus on horror film lyrics, Whoretopsy have a knack of taking the everyday, putting a vile spin on it and rattling off three to four minutes of grunts, growls and heavy beats to tell us the story.
Sadly, I don’t have a lyric sheet so I can only judge the album (one track excepted) on the music The lovely PR people read my review and sent me the lyrics through, so I’ve added a bit about them below. The music, though… It’s bass-heavy, grinding, sickening and utterly wonderful. Vocally, there’s a great mix of incredibly low bellows, grunts and screaming – all the more impressive being the work of a single singer. There’s also some damn fine riffage in there, despite the overall heaviness, and variety in the tracks.
“Dendrophilia” slows itself down to near-sludge territory in between harsh blasts, while “He Wouldn’t Hurt A Fly” goes more for the face-pummelling pace. “Gym Junkie” throws more tempo changes at you than a hatful of prog tracks. In a way, it’s like someone’s dismembered a dozen songs and stitched them back together in a completely fucked-up manner, but with each piece going in the right place. An arm here, a leg there… just from a different person. A white guy’s torso, a Chinese girl’s right hand… It’s all a horrible, bleeding mess but it still functions in a lumbering, nightmare fashion.
The lyrics are wonderfully grisly, yet tongue-in-cheek – at least in places. Some are simply horrific, some blasé or casual about the incredible violence they describe. It’s the way they’re written that makes them stand out from so many other band’, like a little short story rather than a simple description, complete with dialogue. It, frankly, makes the band all the more scary as they mostly read like personal s – a kind of “hey, this happened to my neighbour” or “did you hear about Huey in s?”
With topics ranging from a mentally challenged person losing their rag after being romantically dissed (“He Wouldn’t Hurt A Fly”) to the rather extreme end of the home-made adult film industry (“Jackhammer Skull Fuck”) by way of an alien game show involving masturbating onto a pool full of eggs (OK, so “Hiss Your Eggs Out” isn’t quite a water cooler story like most of the others!)… If you think the guys in Cannibal Corpse have fucked up imaginations, they may have met their match with Whoretopsy.
Whoretopsy take the face-smashing intensity of Dying Fetus and mix it with the whimsical common-day observational skills of Lawnmower Deth. To really appreciate the songs, though, you need lyrics. Thankfully they’ve got a couple of (in)appropriate videos online, including one for the title track which you can enjoy (erm… ish) below.
Never Tear Us Apart is out on August 20th through Vicious Instinct.
Whoretopsy: facebook | bandcamp | youtube
