I'm going to cut straight to the chase with this album. It's basically "Eaten Back to Life"-era CANNIBAL CORPSE. In fact, that's exactly what it is. Released in 1996, several years after a few landmarks in Brutal Death Metal have been made, "Macabre Requiems" is a little late on the Cannibal Corpse clone bandwagon. This is that kind of Death Metal that helped inspire the birth of Brutal Death Metal in New York, except it's from Portugal. The riffs on here are very similar to that of early Cannibal Corpse in that they're gnarly, fast, and have no flavor or direction. I've never been a fan of the New York Death Metal legend's first couple of albums for that reason, and this is no different.

Yes, the riffs are flavorless. With the exception of some cool grooves and themes on "Sado-Masequist Butchery," "Monstrous Anatomic Deformation," and the structure of "Spontaneous Gore," there isn't much here. In fact, the riffs all sound very similar in style and execution, making everything blend and mash together into one, long string of basic tremolo melodies and power chord progressions. This makes the memorability of the record suffer. "Embrace My Cold Body," the intro track, is over three minutes long, and it get old after about half a minute. As a matter of fact, the sounds of the intro can be heard throughout the entire album. They used the same sound effects to start or conclude tracks on multiple occasions. In other words, not only are all of the riffs of the same concept, but the sound effects are too, making this whole album sound extremely repetitive.

Despite being unoriginal and seemingly repetitive, there are some cool grooves on here. "Rotten Grave" is a perfect example of this, having Grindcore-style riffs that are groovy as they are heavy. On "Sado-Masequist Butchery" there are some nice grooves as well. There are also some cool riffs like the one that concludes "Dawn of the Living Dead." It's fast and energetic, especially for GROG. As a whole, this album lacks substance, is not memorable, and is unoriginal. However, the songwriting isn't bad, and some of the songs are pretty catchy. As far as old school Death Metal goes, this isn't anything special, but it's still a fun listen.