Join us today as Scuttlegoat reminisces on Bound and Gagged‘s 2002 release Fornicate the Gutted.
The Crypts of the Unknown harbors many festered treasures. Have you ever come across an album that you enjoy, but seemingly no other human in existence knows about it? Or maybe an album that ticks all the boxes in a style that doesn’t get a lot of love? Oh, and of course, you’ve found this album long after it would have mattered to help the band spread the word… or perhaps it’s just your dirty little secret…
Whatever the case, we here at Goat Review prefer to air our loves to the world, to open the gates of our corroded Crypts to the masses. Fornicate the Gutted may not be perfect, but how would you know?
Rarely do my forum crawls for obscure music yield much of a result nowadays. It’s not that people aren’t eager to recommend me stuff, far from it. But after more than 15 years of obsessively absorbing all metal knowledge I could, there just isn’t much that you could hit me that I have not at least heard about, if not heard in full. To my surprise, I encountered a new name in a thread about jazzy brutal death metal the other day. Beyond the obvious pick of Defeated Sanity and modern names like Effluence that feel a bit like grasping at straws, I got introduced to Bound and Gagged. The musicians in Bound and Gagged have very few accolades in the BDM realm beyond their one album discussed here. Fornicate the Gutted, however, is a unique specimen. There is a jazziness to Bound and Gagged, undeniably so. Through the round, and often surprisingly gentle bass tone and a drum performance that occasionally attempts to be loose and freeform, there is a suspicion that these musicians have a background in genres beyond extreme metal. But where other musicians with an art school background would use this as an opportunity to showboat, Bound and Gagged instead choose to use their talents to channel their own sense of humor.
Funny samples, like the Life of Brian sample in “Intentional Internal Ingestion” are very much part of the DNA of BDM and grind at this point, but it is rarer that musicians a tongue planted in their cheek when it comes to the musical aspects of it. Bound and Gagged play with expectations and clearly enjoy the absurdity of the genre in a way that is both ironic and fully appreciative. Opening a song with campfire guitar and subtly reiterating the rhythmic approach repeatedly in the song proper takes effort and it is effort like this that the musicians take constantly, even when they might not have needed to. The band might hold a pig squeal for over ten seconds or have extended drum breaks that feel as though they collapse onto itself, and the band always goes a bit more ridiculous than their contemporaries. Sadly, Fornicate the Gutted is not perfect. The mix is very vocal forward considering that the vocals are by far the musical element with the least variety on the album, the engineering choices in general don’t always let the more technical bits shine. This is likely also due to the chosen guitar tone, a mid-90s crunch transported into the 2000s — without many updates in the production department. These choices will turn some listeners off, as Fornicate the Gutted is very intense to begin with and takes some work to get into. I can forgive a lot of it because oddities like this, as mentioned in the beginning, I encounter very rarely. Sadly the lack of profitability also means that a remaster is likely not in the works right now. To the open minded slammer Fornicate the Gutted is very much worth a listen, however — and very much worth the work.
