Holy piston-spined slave-grafted-to-a-war-machine, Batman! That art is sick! Check out the rusted gears and wickedly curved saw blades bolted to the hunched torso of a corroded skeleton whose knobby phalanges grip the trigger of a high powered automatic weapon sporting triple bayonets and a pair of nasty looking (though oddly ineffectual) drill bits as thick as your fists. The skull (with "Nr. III" etched into its side, which could mean myriad awesome things) is fitted with a mask that extends into an endless corrugated snout drawn past a long row of ominous artillery; not even the eye sockets are wasted, equipped as they are with cruelly pointed knives. So while appearances can be deceiving, this is unlikely to be a record of seduction music, unless you're trying to seduce a buried and forgotten WWII-era Terminator experiment designed by a time-traveling H. R. Giger. (And who among us hasn't yearned for that forbidden grit-caked torture love?)

Deadborn burst out of the German metal landscape with strongly written, sharply executed demolition tactics. Without pomp or pretense, _Mayhem Maniac Machine_ simply saws through skulls with its punchy riffage, howling leads, and smart, agile rhythm section. Vocals grind out like a bulldozer scraping through a field of broiled bones. Songs grow, shift, then lash out from shadowy corners where less dedicated bands would shrink back toward the obvious. Some credit surely goes to Christoph Brandes, whose behind-the-boards knob knowledge lends the record an immediately engaging urgency. Most of _MMM_ lives in the fertile land of full speed percussion and anti-melodic midrange bowel-drilling, but occasionally (as in the back half of "Profanatic Reanimation" and the middle of "Reinvented Power Process") Kevin Olasz peels solos from his strings that splash bright red gore over the otherwise bleak, light-eating behemoth. In thirty-five minutes, the beast bursts from the depths, feeds, shits, and burrows again toward its uneasy slumber.

Until you push play again.