Stoma – Scat Aficionados (2005)

September 4, 2023

Scat Aficionados has gotta be one of the better sounding goregrind records you can get your disgusting little hands on. Slightly atypical of the blasting gore approach, Stoma do not employ a trashcan / bin-lid snare drum and instead have more regular produced drums (still doing lovely punk beats and insane blastbeats, of course).

Production wise, this is where the album shines. Both the guitar and the bass (wow, the bass) sound absolutely gargantuan. Together they create hugh fucking slabs of filthy grinding noise. Vocally, I don’t think it would be cheap to compare the duo of vocalists here to a style used by Regurgitate, only instead of one guy switching between clean and pitchshifted vocals, Stoma have two vocalists, one for each style, allowing them to overlap or follow each other in quick succession, which just adds to the chaos on display.

The cover art is basically a meme / legend of the shadier underworld of grindcore at this point, but this album is really, really fucking good (this band is really, really fucking good – it is a shame that they haven’t released that much stuff).