Symphonies of Sickness

After the extreme recording conditions of the debut, Reek of Putrefaction, the second album is the one you can actually hear. It was recorded over July and August 1989 at The Slaughterhouse Studios in Great Driffield, East Yorkshire, produced by Colin Richardson with the band, and released by Earache in November 1989. There are fewer songs than on the debut, each one longer and more intricately built. On "Exhume to Consume", "Ruptured in Purulence" and "Crepitating Bowel Erosion" the construction of the riffs and the exchange between the two voices are placed where they can be followed — what the first record intended, arriving as sound for the first time. The habit of building song titles out of medical vocabulary settles here too, and it is the starting point for the writing that would be called goregrind. The running order here is that of the 1989 12-inch, MOSH 18; the CD of the same year appends the whole of the debut.