FULCI ‎– Tropical Sun / VINYL LP

Clearly in thrall to the warped, perverse works of legendary director Lucio Fulci, you might expect this three-piece Italian death metal outfit to run along similar lines to NECROPHAGIA, with defiantly old-school ethos and gallons of celluloid-wrapped nonsense. But the revelation here—albeit only for those of us who foolishly missed the band’s 2017 debut, Opening The Hell Gates—is that FULCI are masters of a very timely, thuggish strain of slamming death metal, more closely related to the marauding fury of CANNIBAL CORPSE and DYING FETUS than to anything more arcane or traditional. Channeling the spirit of classic Fulci films like “The Beyond” and “The House By The Cemetery” through short, sharp bursts of ultraviolent deathgrind, with numerous mischievous cinematic flourishes and incidental detours that regularly evoke the specter of low-budget horror, “Tropical Sun” is an absurdly entertaining, blood-spattered slam dunk.