What’s Austria’s finest metal band? Yeah, that’s right- it’s a rhetorical question. Perverted, gore-obsessed death metal gods- Pungent Stench are far beyond any competition. Let’s take a close look on their debut album.
Martin Shirenc’s crew serves us an amazing mixture- a bit of Obituary-style slow, smashing riffs (and a bit similar vocals), fast, thrashy parts, sometimes a bit of Possessed. In one word- all that’s the best in extreme metal. And that sound- damn! Band’s name is really accurate here- everything is so dirty and between the sounds we can notice a lot of, hmm.. well- pungent stench ;)
No melodies, no technical blablabla’s- just pure  aggression and violence, but in the same time compositions are really good and stay in mind for a long time. Look for example at title song, every time I listen to this album, I’ve got the verse “For Go Your Soul, For Me Your Flesh” in mind for around 3-4 days. Or just listen to Pungent Stench (talking about the song right now, but this sentence can be actually generalized to whole band’s material) guitar riffs. WONDERFUL.  We simply got one of the best, yet extremely underrated, death metal albums in a history. Raw, filthy but greatly composed songs, played with aggression and passion. Forget modern death metal, where 90% of bands sounds the same- it’s not the way how it should sound. Everyone should learn from Vienna’s best musical product- mighty Pungent Stench.
Wojciech Michalak