Less than a month ago, Spanish Death Metallers AVULSED released their "Altar Of Disembowellment" EP on the none-more-underground Xtreem Music record label. The screams of the mutilated have barely stopped echoing through the torture chamber and already they're bringing out ''Stabwound Orgasm'', an album originally released in 1999 but which has long been out of print. True to form, this is another slice of unpleasant, blood-spattered gore metal that's heavier than dark matter. If you've only just discovered them and want to delve into their back catalogue then this is certainly well-timed, but it's no lost-classic by any means. It's good fun and has its tongue firmly lodged in its rotting cheek (they've got a guitar played by a man called Juancar for heaven's sake) but there is better Death Metal out there.

After a brief instrumental, the title track is the first proper song and it is suitably intense. Frontman DAVE ROTTEN has a pleasingly deep growl to accompany the blast beats and the first twelve seconds are so astonishingly aggressive it's hard to imagine how he can keep it up for the duration of the song, never mind the rest of the album. It's a single-minded piece of bludgeoning and a decent start, followed by the similar "Blessed By Gore". The drumming here is especially good and it's surprisingly catchy considering it's impossible to make out a single lyric.

It's on "Compulsive Hater" though that AVULSED pull out the big guns. On the previous tracks the guitars had been little more than extra percussion, but here they step to the forefront for some blistering leads and melodies. This is the first moment to really impress and it's repeated later on "Homeless Necrophile", where the six-stringers unleash some excellent riffs over lyrics that could be the synopsis of a grindhouse movie.

In other words, this is the kind of metal that's grown up watching old Italian zombie films and comes packaged with offensive t-shirts, but isn't quite as mindless as it might first appear. Unfortunately, while AVULSED do have flashes of brilliance they're not repeated enough to make this an essential purchase. It's a perfectly enjoyable Death Metal record and the booklet has more tits in it than Redtube, but it's not worth hunting down unless you absolutely, positively must have each and every one of their albums and missed this first time round.