Convulse - World Without God

I know that there are many maniacs who hate seeing some old albums re-released, but I must say if any old LPs were about to be re-released, this full length was definitely one of the most awaited. Let's be honest, the prices of the original, difficult to find, pressing of "World Without God" LP were sometimes ridiculous, reaching over 100 euros on Ebay! So it was about time, when someone takes the album into XXI century and release it again. Relapse did that (right after they've done brilliant job with exhumating Nirvana 2002), on beautiful vinyl as well as CD, adding "Resuscitation of Evilness" demo as a bonus, what makes it even more worthy piece of wax for the death metal worshipers. Alltogether there are 14 old school death metal tracks on the vinyl (16 on CD)! What a damn feast!

I hope I don't need to introduce Convulse to you, as it was one of the leading bands on the Finnish scene. It's a shame that for so many years this name didn't appear in the underground press, but luckily we can listen to their legacy and believe me, "World Without God" is one of the best Finnish LPs, one which equals "Nepenthe" or "Slumber of the Sullen Eyes" easily! The music on "World Without God" is simply brutal. It's midpaced, not overly complicated death metal, which takes the equal influences from their Finnish companions, as well as bands like Grave and other Swedish bands, and occassionaly goes even further, into American legends like Incantation. The dark horror atmosphere, smell of the rotten corpses... You can feel it in every minute of this album and that's something I always look for in the death metal. The riffs are thick and song structures not overly complicated, this LP is straigh forward slaughtering piece, an axe that is about to smash your head with some heavy riffing and dense atmosphere. Occassionally Convulse picks up some more harmonic, melodic riffs, just to diversify their music a little, and so in these fragments they may remind you few Swedish bands ("False Religion" with a cool acoustic interruption in the midle of the song, "Blasphemous Verses", etc), but generally I think Convulse is more brutal than most of their Scandinavian friends, but if think of such bands as early Grave, Crematory, then you may get the vision... And Rami's vocals... Man, of course it's anything like Demilich or Disgrace even, but the guy also had amazing guttural vokills.

As I already said, "World Without God" re-release comes with the "Resuscitation of Evilness" demo and that's great bonus. Although all the demo songs are re-recorded on the full length, I always love to listen to band's early recordings, if it's a demo or EP, I don't care, but it's cool to hear band's development and compare the demo with the album. The demo production is much rawer and filthy of course, but the songs already had that power and the guys had the skills to skin you alive.

As for the other things concerning the album, "World Without God" comes with one of my favorite front covers of that time and I also must say that Convulse had some really cool lyrics. Unlike many other death metal bands, which wrote bullshit non death metal lyrics, Convulse had strong atrichristian influence in their texts, with such lyrics like "World Without God", "Blasphemous Verses", "False Religion". There're also some more gore oriented texts, "Putrid Intercourse" and "Incantation of Restoration" for instance... And example? Here we go:

"...Knock on the doors and violate domestic peace
Sell the salvation and I spit against your faces
Why do you have to intrude with your fuckin' Jesus books
It's against my views and injures my soul

Your faith is weak and only a deception
The holy bible proves against itself
Your faith is your opinion about religion
But real believer believes always himself..."

How sweet. Really there are many things you should kill for this album, it's a must have in your collection, trust me!
Final rate: 85 / 100