Odious Mortem is a young band crawling out of the Californian gutters. They only released one demo in 2003, which led to the deal with Unique Leader so we can say they blasted off with a good start. “Devouring The Prophecy” was already recorded in march 2004 and I have no idea why it took Unique Leader so long to release it. Anyway, it’s still a relevant album because the U.S. brutal death metal hype is far from over. In fact every month a few good, dozens of mediocre and hundreds of shitty albums are being released so we certainly can speak of a trend here.

If you’re wondering in which category Odious Mortem falls you have to ask yourself one question: do I love relentlessly brutal death metal which rages on and on, disregarding recognizable song structures and spitting in the face of melody. If the answer is yes you just have found yourself a new dose of guts ‘n gore for your addiction, so go get it! If you said no you’ll probably never like this style of metal and you can abstain from reading any Unique Leader reviews in the future, saving yourself some time and Rockezine some bandwidth.

Odious Mortem doesn’t stray far from the path which was laid down by bands like Suffocation, Gorgasm, Disgorge and Deeds Of Flesh. The ten tracks have all the known ingredients like guttural vocals, ultra fast guitars and hyper speed drums; and are quite interchangeable with each other. I personally tend to look at albums like this as a whole rather than analysing each song so this doesn’t bother me that much but what bothers me to a certain extent is the production of “Devouring The Prophecy”.

The overall sound is fitting to the genre but the bass guitar sounds very odd, it’s almost as if it stands out from the rest of the music, it’s too much upfront in the mix and in contrast the vocals are set too far back. This results in an unbalanced sound which deteriorates the overall impact of the album. Still it’s a good debut and a good starting point to expand their career further on.