Mortuary Ghoul – Norman

Not even a year after the band’s debut album, Death Metal one-piece Mortuary Ghoul returns with its follow-up. An album that is obviously based upon ‘Psycho’, one of the ultimate classics of horror cinema. ‘Psycho’, on its turn, was allegedly loosely based on the legacy of Ed Gein, a man that not only showed the world that true horror exists, but even more so he showed that mankind is pathologically obsessed with the sick, the morbid, the violent and depraved evil.

If you’ve listened to the band’s entire back catalogue you’ll hear that the project gets increasingly better in pouring the good old, tried-and-tested Mortician formula in its mould. Extremely heavy, down-tuned and jammed with movie samples, obviously from ‘Psycho’ this time, so the whole shebang is present. That means it might go down as unoriginal, and yes, that certainly is the case, but since Mortician’s last album dates back to 2004 (!) then in the meantime, this functions as a perfectly fine substitute.

The album clocks in just over half an hour, an ideal length for an album in this style, and chronologically tells the story of the movie in eleven tracks, making this album a more than perfect soundtrack. In fact, ‘Norman’ is one of the most accurate and well-executed homages to Mortician’s musical legacy as well as to the whole gory horror cinema in Extreme Metal that ever surfaced. Its simple, bulldozing and IQ-shattering: just the way this sort of music is supposed to be played. Beautifully brutal and savage in all its gory perfection.