The 2004 Reviews Section: Suhrim, Unidentified Flying Bodyparts

SUHRIM

UNIDENTIFIED FLYING BODYPARTS
HYBREED RECORDS, 2003
3 OUT OF 5
SUMMARY | "ANTWERP MORTICIAN" FLESHES OUT SONGS, BORES ME SILLY.

This album originally came out on Uxicon around 2001/02. Yeah, I'm surprised something actually came out on that label myself. Needless to say, Unidentified Flying Bodyparts got lost in the shuffle and Hybreed decided to re-release the album. The result is, unfortunately for me, intense disappointment with Suhrim after three years of waiting.

Suhrim released a pretty good demo called Gore Is The End in 2000, and though it had somewhat of a Mortician-esque sound (the band calls itself the Antwerp Mortician, after all) the sense of humour showed through in the demo and I thought the band would carry that over into Unidentified Flying Bodyparts. Needless to say, Suhrim took a shit all over my expectations by becoming a more generic gore-oriented death metal band. The band sounds more professional and the melodies are more complex than on Gore Is The End, but something seems lost in the translation. For one thing, almost all of the light-hearted bits present in the demo seem to be gone, which I guess should be expected as it is death metal we are talking about here. Still, parts like when the vocalist would imitate Elvis for a second endeared me to Suhrim. Here was a band not afraid to do something stupid like that and now (aside from two clips from some film I'm unfamiliar with) that band is dead. It kind of annoys me, really.

Also, after reading the lyrics I have to wonder why I like Suhrim's music in the first place. Honestly, I don't use the word "insipid" too often - it's an overused word, everyone loves it these days for some reason - but these fucking lyrics seem like they're trying to aim for every popular niche in death metal and run with it for a while. One song will be a gore piece like "UFB" and then WHAM! "Old Bomb Fucked Bitch" will try to make an appeal to the pornogrind lovers. Suhrim even gets Lovecraft references in a Christ-is-bad song like "666" and the two tastes don't go great together. I've never worried too much about death metal lyrics - who the hell can understand forced grunts to begin with? - but Unidentified Flying Bodyparts is like a freakin' case study of bad lyricism. I know Suhrim is Belgian but the lyrics here seem like the band raped the old bitch of an English teacher. There is no excuse for such unadultered shit.

To be honest, I don't know why the band released this album to begin with. Suhrim is capable of doing better - much better. Unidentified Flying Bodyparts is one of those albums where a band who has been in the death metal scene since the early 1990's (some would say they're leeches jumping on popular DM bandwagons - I'm not one of them) releases an album pandering to a wider audience than it needs to focus on. The music is becoming tighter and more involving but Suhrim must now focus on the audience it wants to go for. I don't want the band to become the next coming of Birdflesh or an Angelcorpse clone, mind you. I just want Suhrim to stop wading in the morass of the underground DM scene because the band is capable of much more than what's on Unidentified Flying Bodyparts. I don't want to see a decent band like Suhrim become another generic, meaningless footnote in the history of the Belgian death metal scene, because that's not the fate the band deserves.

HYBREED RECORDS
PO Box 11
9000 Gent 21
BELGIUM
[email protected]

SUHRIM
c/o Johan Antonissen
Beeckmansstraat 3
2170 Merksem
BELGIUM
http://suhrim.deathmetal.be/
[email protected]