TRAUMA: “KARMA OBSCURA”

(In this post TheMadIsraeli provides a brief review of the new studio album released by Poland’s Trauma.)

It’s Polish and it’s death metal.

I often wonder if we shouldn’t just completely ignore Polish death metal in our reviews.  It’s always good, always consistent, always delivers the brutality every metalhead craves (and in a lot of ways defines it), and it’s honestly hard to justify reviewing it sometimes.  It’s almost always just going to read like that beginning sentence in essay form.

However, Trauma aren’t the typical Polish death metal recipe, taking a very Benighted/Napalm Death/Misery Index/Carcass approach to their sound.  So I guess it might be more fair to call them a deathgrind band.  The music is beefy as fuck, riffy, catchy, and has some very nice melodic incorporations amidst the chaos. 

I’d never heard of these guys before, but they’ve been around a good while, Polish death vets holding 6 albums (now 7 with this one), a demo, and an EP to their traumatic name.  Their sound is one of the few instances where I feel the word crushing is completely accurate.  Karma Obscura is one of those fun, good times, throwdown death metal records that exists to do nothing but make you pissed and ready to beat some ass in a pit.  The melodic portions are surprisingly nice and fit into their sound well, too. I don’t know if this is a staple of their sound since I haven’t heard these guys until now, however I’m definitely going to be looking into this in the future.

It’s really fucking good though.  I’d suggest checking it out; stream the whole album below.

Karma Obscura can be ordered on CD here and it’s also available on iTunes.

https://www.facebook.com/TraumaOfficialPage