Mutant Flesh is the 2018 debut LP from LA-based, hard-hitting death rockers, Deth Crux. The album is a tight, charging burst of punk agit-rock, barely contained by the expensive nature of the album’s concept- a gothic rock opera about a city slowly overrun by hungry and promiscuous teenage mutants. Featuring members of doom metal outfit Buried at Sea and death metal ghouls Lightning Swords of Death, Deth Crux extracts the blackened heart of Bauhaus and transplants it into a zombie werewolf, and then set the freak lose to be raised in the sewers and streets of an abandoned industrial sacrifice zone by a cohort of churlish crust punks, surviving mostly on a steady diet of discarded trash and Christian Death.
Campy, haunting, and disturbingly seductive, Mutant Flesh is the b-grade horror saga soundtrack you didn’t realize you needed in your life. “Phantom Blood” is coldly brooding with white-hot anger roiling beneath its surface- like a fridge rainfall, descending on freshly spread asphalt that's become the entomb a luckless victim of mob violence, and whose ghost will not know rest before it knows bloody vengeance. “Spectral Other” is forceful in its depiction of consuming paranoia, while “Black Abominable Lust” births a cursed medium that channels ominous contorting guitars which entwine menacingly with spectacularly spectral vocal cascades. “Chrome Lips” portrays the loneliest chapter of a necrotic neon-noir diegesis, complete with a goose-pimple-inducing sax solo. Finally, we arrive at, “Mutant Flesh” which feels like a spider-like, belly-dragging descent into a catacomb of chthonic madness and irreversible Cronenbergian degeneration.
If anyone reading this is considering footing the bill for a remake of C.H.U.D., you should seriously consider writing these guys a check to get them on retainer for the OST.
Mutant Flesh was released via Sentient Ruin. You can still pick up some physical copes here.
