Mark Riddick and Fetid Zombie
I came across a blog post about Mark Riddick – and apologies, but I can’t remember where or how – sometime before we left for Europe. Mark is an artist who has been drawing insane, sick, disgusting and altogether amazing death metal artwork and logos for extreme metal bands since 2001.
His son was diagnosed with a rare form of diabetes (Nephrogenic Diabetes Insipidus, or NDI) and so to help raise money for the organisation that funds research into the condition, he created a limited edition print and t-shirt package. It looks pretty gruesome, it’s for a good cause and hey, PayPal isn’t real money anyway, so I bought one.
The package arrived while we were away and holy shit, it’s awesome: a beautiful print on black which I’ll have to frame, cool t-shirt (I got the shirt for Dave) and the package had some bonus stuff including stickers from Mark’s band Unburied (he plays bass) and a poster and CD from Fetid Zombie, a death metal side-project where he plays all the instruments and writes all the songs (and naturally, creates all the artwork).
Pleasures of the Scalpel, which I received, was Fetid Zombie’s debut release and it’s really good fun. Although only 31 minutes long, there’s a ton of really catchy riffs that I kept finding myself humming after the very first listening. Guest guitar solos are contributed by some fairly stellar death metal guitarists including Jim Malone from Arsis, and of course the artwork is appropriately revolting. If I had to pick a low point, the vocals sound over-manipulated and a little grating if you listen for too long but on the whole I really enjoyed the release and was pretty stoked to get it free! Fetid Zombie have a follow-up release, Abort the Messiah, which I will have to add to my collection as well.