UMUR
"A Collection of Depravation" is a compilation album by Swedish goregrind act General Surgery. The album was released through Relapse Records in March 2012. General Surgery formed in 1988 and were active in the early nineties before a longer hiatus ensued. They reformed in 2003 and have since released a couple of studio albums. "A Collection of Depravation" is a collection of of singles, EPs, compilation tracks and some unreleased demo tracks.
The music on the album is goregrind in the early Carcass/Exhumed tradition. Out of the literally hundreds of Carcass imitators on the scene, General Surgery have always been one of the best. They write strong material, handle their instruments well and most of their releases feature decent sound productions, which are features that can´t necessarily be applied to releases by many of their collegues. The quality of the 30 tracks on "A Collection of Depravation" is also pretty high but after listening to about half of the nearly 70 minutes long album, the tracks begin to sound too much the same and it´s hard to argue against that the music style is one-dimensional as hell. I´m sure that´s how fans of the genre wants it to be, but for us more casual listeners it can get a bit much sitting through the full album. As far as being cohesive as a full listening experience "A Collection of Depravation" succeeds pretty well as the sound production on the various tracks don´t differ too much.
Of course song-titles like "Mortuary Wars", "The League of Extraordinary Grave Robbers" and "Fully-Mechanized Corpse Thresher" pull my rating up, because that´s great humour in my book. Seriously though "A Collection of Depravation" is actually a pretty great compilation of General Surgery tracks and I think a 3 star (60%) rating is warranted.