I have always found Reissues as a great way to find out old underground albums that have been criminally overlooked by the majority of the Metal crowd. This seems especially true for fans of Death Metal, where there seems to be tons and tons of gems hidden from the 80's and 90's, that would sound timeless even today. So we got the Reissue of the 1993 released EP "Atavism" by Australian Death Metal band CRUCIFORM.

The record has an additional 5 songs in this reissue, of course remastered for this re-release. The album starts with an symphony style instrumental, "Prologue", aimed at generating tempo and tension in the listener's mind. This works fine but doesn't really show what the band's real sound is until the next song, "Sanctuary", which hits you like pile of rocks falling intermittently. The riffs are very sharp, groovy, juicy and raw and put the Death Metal connoisseurs at home. They are not extremely fast allowing the listeners to absorb the juice of the riffs! "Reduced To Dust" reminds you that CRUCIFORM has lot of similarities with bands like OBITUARY and FACEBREAKER due to the aforementioned style of the guitar work. The drum work sounds polished, especially due to the reproduction work for this release and fits right with the sound. "Necropolis" is an epic 8 min roller coaster as the band takes you through different paces and churns the song into one of the better songs of the record. "Proboscus" brings in some sharp innovative riffs that sounded fresh to my ears.  The last of the original songs "I, To The Heavens Shall Lift My Eyes" is haunting dark riff carnage, especially due to the triple grunting vocals.

The 2 songs added from their 1995 Demo, i.e. "Paradox" and "Gutter", are 2 excellent groovy Death Metal songs, both clocking more than 7 min and still managing to keep you interested. The rest of the record is the live versions of these 2 songs and "I, To The Heavens Shall Lift My Eyes", and all 3 songs sound less than convincing mostly due to the bad recording and production, while some may argue that they are raw and aggressive, I think they lose their originality in these live versions.

Having said that, "Atavism" is an excellent record, being reissued on Aug 17^th, and is sure to be a treat for all Death Metal connoisseurs who like their Metal groovy and having some meat in them. Tell you what; just pick this up for the songs from the original record.<