MAUSOLEUM
“Tales of the Zombiecult”
by Doc Holocausto
During the dark, sultry days of August of 2001, a new living dead nightmare arose from the already zombie-cursed hinterland of western Pennsylvania that George A. Romero had made utterly infamous in the abhorrent, grue-dripping annals of horror cinema in 1968. It was then that, amidst the almost post-apocalyptic atmosphere of Johnstown – that dreary and now rust-devoured “Furnace of Hell” of years past, which had fulfilled 19th-century America’s ravening hunger for steel – was begotten the filthy and foetid monstrosity that is … MAUSOLEUM. Born out of the worship of the primordial Gods of Death Metal, those savage and stripped-down death cults like DEATH, NECROPHAGIA, ENTOMBED, OBITUARY, and, of corpse, AUTOPSY, and raised upon a steady, and steadily unwholesome, diet of Horror in any and all of its appalling incarnations, from novels and comics to films, in particular gut-munching zombie chunk blowers, MAUSOLEUM exists simply to vomit forth hideous death-reeking sickness into the very face of the stale and sterile “technical death metal” drivel of today. The macabre death-rattling morbidity that is scraped off their mortician’s slab, with its loathsome gore-shrieking vocals, its doomful cacophony of down-tuned guitars, and its barbarous drum bludgeoning, is a disdainful anachronism: a throwback to those fiendish days of yore when death metal was new and noisome and nasty. As vocalist and drummer Rick “Slim” Boast had proclaimed, “We just want to make heavy fucking music that is fun to listen to!” And so, after two years of rehearsals and recordings, the zombie horde’s debut offering of lumbering undead rot, “Cadaveric Displays of Ghoulish Ghastliness,” nine hacking cuts of old school death metal, was unleashed in 2003 by Rot Island’s very own “Horror Hive,” Razorback Records. Despite its raw production, the album was well received and was even re-released in 2007 by Goryfied Productions for European death-freaks. But the years after “Cadaveric Displays …” witnessed MAUSOLEUM abandoning two years of work for an outrageously horrid sophomore opus as well as hammering out some personnel shifts within its ranks. Finally, after all of that tumult had settled, the ghoul-corps descended upon Horned Moon Music’s recording facility, “The Funeral Home,” and, with the unholy support of producer and engineer Xul, unearthed yet another nine revoltingly dread-filled rituals of death. Together, those songs resurrected not simply the sound but the sinfully foul soul of early ‘90s metal of death, of which MAUSOLEUM assembles in adulation. Together, those songs would become the band’s second album, “Back from the Funeral,” released in 2011 through a renewed black covenant with Razorback Records. And so now, as MAUSOLEUM consumes audiences of unsuspecting victims with their very first live massacres, you can no longer escape the question … Are you prepared to worship before the altar of Zombiecult Death Metal?!?
