Putrefied Finnish death metal weirdness, just the way I love it. Disgusting and fast-paced death metal as Rotted Life specializes in, but with the eccentricities I crave in my death. Malformed bring it all on their debut demo, reissued here as a five-song EP that slimes you with a barbaric old-school DM assault while dropping mind-boggling bass runs and moments of that uniquely Finnish quirk that kept this disc in rotation for awhile. It's gonna be right up your alley if you're addicted to that "OSDM" sound, as these guys deliver a tight, crushing attack that mixes up the tempos while always concentrating on maximum heaviness. Lyrically, its as profane and gory as it gets, with lengthy exclamations of gross body horror, butchery, and religious blasphemy. The opener "Malformity" is crushing, evoking the early 90s masters with the faster, thrashing parts, sudden descents into slower churning crush, and sporadic blastbeats.

But then as Malformed drop off into some awesome, cadaverous doom-death, bassist Pauli Niemi goes berserk with these awesome fret-board runs and bouncy, almost fusiony bass slaps that are way up in the front of the mix...you don't pften hear this kind of nimble, complex bass blurt in bands that draw from the old-school death metal well...and then the twin guitars from Akseli Lindroos and Eetu Hyvönen start to follow, turning into these crazy, complicated Gordian Knots of fret-board lunacy.

There's so many of these deranged, intricate guitar solos, discordant chord progressions, odd polyrhythms and that goddamn bass guitar shred freak-outs throughout the EP. The band puts all of this together terrifically, from the turbulent gut-blasting writhing "Eyes Torn Out" with its mesmeric grooves and Eetu Hyvönen's sickening sub-guttural vocals, to the chaotic noise and insane guitar shred that births "Satisfactory Evisceration" and the thrashing violence and catchy riffing that sends "Descendants Of Celestial Beings" hurtling through a haze of moldy decay....it's killer. These moments of unorthodox musicality that jump out of the churning, crushing death metal that make me think that these guys hacve been consuming a steady diet of older tech-death stuff like Death's Human, Spheres-era Pestilence or even Atheist's Piece of Time alongside the classic Finnish death filth that obviously forms the core of their sound.

Malformed are also another example of how Rotted Life, a label run by longtime C-Blast pal Jason Mantis of legendary dark ambient/industrial label Malignant, the seminal (for me, at least) Audio Drudge fanzine. His curation of the most cadaverous, horrendous death metal is perfect, finding stuff like Malformed that delivers all of the orthodox death metal you'd want, but with those weird elements that make the band sound more unique. One of my favorite discs on the label. I can't wait to hear more stuff from these guys.