This classic blast of outre deathgrind gets plastered on platter anew via The Crypt Records, featuring the original twelve-song track listing and sleeve artwork; it's accompanied by an insert sheet with lyrics, art, and liner notes. It's been awhile since the Nuclear Death releases have been available on vinyl, so it's good to get these pustulent periods of Nuclear Death's evolution into the psychedelic vomit gods we know and love back in our hands again. And man, this stuff still sounds as extreme as ever. Coming out of Phoenix, Arizona in the late 80s, Nuclear Death stood out in the burgeoning extreme metal underground with a twenty-something girl named Lori Bravo on vocals and bass who sounded like hell unleashed, her voice swooping from monstrous guttural growls to bizarre wordless vocalizations to killer falsetto screams. Backed by drummer Joel Whitfield and guitarist Phil Hampson, Bravo led the band through an inchoate nightmare of grinding, ultra-noisy death metal that started off as a more thrash-influenced sound, but which had evolved into one of the weirdest death/grind bands of its era by the release of their legendary 1991 album Carrion For Worm.

I still remember when I first saw the ad for Nuclear Death's Bride Of Insect when it appeared in a 1990 issue of Metal Maniacs, I could barely take my eyes off of the grotesque hand-drawn artwork depicting a clan of irradiated abominations surrounding a withered hag licking the slop off of some mutant infant, a huge skull-faced spider-like monstrosity hovering over them. The band name and that artwork suggested that Bride held sublime sonic horrors, and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. The album's twelve songs featured a slightly less chaotic version of Nuclear Death's psychotic bestial death metal, but this stuff was (and is) still plenty bizarre, the songs whipped up in a nail-studded whirlwind of sloppy blastbeats and murky riffs, the songs spinning off in weird off-kilter anti-grooves and angular breakdowns, while Lori's awesome, seething vocals echo through the band's cyclonic violence, with some subversively catchy hooks lodged like stray bits of bone matter in these chunks of blackened grind. Tracks like "Necrobestiality", "Feral Viscera", "The Misshapen Horror" and the title track continue to evoke the band's unique nightmare visions of rotting bodies fused together in dripping carnal combinations, mutant birth-sacs and surreal sexual depravations dredged from the deepest recesses of the human psyche. The combination of ripping thrash riffs, Scum-level chaos, and sludgy discordant death metal is intense to say the least, but compared to the delirious sonic vomit that would follow, this is probably their most straightforward work.

An essential collection of some of the most chaotic, brain-scrambling and utterly filthy extreme metal ever unleashed, this also includes the original album layout and artwork.