Now those are names that inspire a certain level of anticipation and also expectation. On Meathook Seed, Mitch Harris handles the guitars, bass and does backing vocals while Donald Tardy sits behind the drum kit and Trevor Peres handles the vocals.

The music is driving industrial metal mixed with groovy riffs and some death metal and punk influences. The album opens with the pounding pseudo industrial “Famine Sector” which is bass heavy and sounds a little bit like Nailbomb. Surprisingly, for a side project, the song writing is pretty good throughout and the songs actually get better as the album progresses. Peres’s vocals shift from death metal grunts to screeching to a punky shout along type vocal approach. Mitch Harris does add in some samples and rather dated sounding techno beats but they’re buried quite deep in the mix. The grooves that the band hit mostly sound like they could have been on Napalm’s “Inside The Torn Apart” album but that is not to say that these are leftover riffs. Meathook Seed does occasionally sound like Obituary and Napalm Death but the main thrust is on songs that combine a punk aesthetic with more discordant industrial sounding guitar riffs. This is best demonstrated on “My Infinity” with its pounding drums , a sick guitar riff that snakes its way along and Trevor Peres shouting out the vocals.

The electronic element raises its head through most of the songs on the album and contributes to the feeling of carefully controlled chaos that permeates through all eleven songs.

Album highlights include the noisy “My Infinity,” the adrenaline charged “Day Of Conceiving” and the chunky title song, “Embedded.”

In the end, Meathook Seed is a pretty good album. Not essential by any stretch of the imagination and the electronic beats and guitar style that’s more industrial than death metal or grindcore means that this album is not for everybody. Still, if your tastes are a little diverse and you like experimenting with heavy bands then you could do a lot worse than Meathook Seed.

Meathook Seed – Embedded

Year Of Release – 1993
Label – Earache