JARHEAD FERTILIZER
JARHEAD FERTILIZER – “Carceral Warfare”
by Thor
Maryland’s purveyors of purulent OSDM return with their second full length album titled “Carceral Warfare” and it’s another nasty one.
JARHEAD FERTILIZER shares both current and former members with the insane grindcore outfit FULL OF HELL, and they began with an aesthetic that did a lot less to belie that fact. However, the band’s current style obscures its members’ punk-adjacent origins and even its own early Power Violence/Grindcore leanings entirely. The JARHEAD FERTILIZER of 2024 is ugly, odious, glorious death metal, through and through.
“Carceral Warfare” sees the band trim some stylistic fat, honing its OSDM approach to a lethal purity. I happened to enjoy the proverbial fat featured in 2021’s “Product of My Environment”, but in comparison, “Carceral Warfare” is lean and mean. Gone are the overt grind and slam passages. From start to finish, this album is a cavernous, down-tuned slab of rank, moldy death metal with guttural wailings that would feel right at home on an INCANTATION or a DISMA record.
Also, despite being a full-length album, “Carceral Warfare” is relatively short. Songs like “Blood of the Lamb”, “Parasitic Pathology”, and “Mark of the Beast” waste no time getting to the blasphemous point. Every track is heavy and violent, with a raw and organic production to match the album’s dread-inducing aural filth … in a good way.
While “Carceral Warfare” didn’t blow me away to the extent that “Product of My Environment” did, it’s a worthy successor, nonetheless. Fans of bands like IMMOLATION, GOREFEST, or PHOBOPHILIC will rejoice.