Cartilage – Operating Altar
Release Date: 11th September 2026
Label: Everlasting Spew Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Deathgrind, Gore Metal.
FFO: Exhumed, Impaled, Carcass, Disgorged, Impetigo, Repulsion, Terrorizer, Benighted, Haemorrhage, General Surgery.
Review By: Malte Brigge
The Bay Area has a special place in almost every metalhead’s iron heart for its contributions to the scene, and I love that it still pustulates scummy, phlegmatic bands like Necrot, Ghoul, and Vastum, who scrape their riffs off the broken sidewalks and break skulls on the brick sills of dilapidated storefronts. But, being the Bay Area, there’s an inescapable flare for the arts and theater, which may be why Cartilage decided to go beyond releasing another collection of brutal deathgrind tracks and gift us Operating Altar, a sweet bedtime story about a surgeon whose serial deeds reign unchecked for decades in the bowels of St Petersen’s University Hospital, and boy can you just hear the glee on his grinful face as he tears yet another body to pieces.
Wading into the murky, filthy waters of conceptual musical theater has forced a notable shift in Cartilage’s sinew-stripped sound. Mark Wallace has always led the band as a two-tier vocalist, but previous Cartilage albums didn’t show anything particularly remarkable about his low grunt / high shriek tradeoff, excepting that he had more of a Carcass/Exhumed level distinction than, say, the multifunctional individual attack of Haemorrhage. On Operating Altar, really for the first time, Cartilage sound like a distinct band: Wallace has developed his highs away from mimicking Matt Harvey’s raspy shriek and they remind me more than anything of Dr Mikannibal’s delightfully cartoonish work on “Inked in Blood (Rerecorded)”. Think raw beef, squeaky toy, and blender (especially on Among the Offal and the title track). Operating Altar sounds exactly like the album you’d get if the gremlins paired up with early-2000s Aborted and no one was sober for the entire recording process. If hearing Wallace’s two voices scream, “Metal! Bone! And sinew!” doesn’t fill you with joy, … well, this album isn’t for you.
Yeah, but what about the riffs, you bark. You want riffs? Take your pick. Put on your gloves and OSHA-approved safety goggles, press play at any point and get yourself a big bonesaw spray of riffs and riffbits flying off in every direction. I could point to some that made me particularly happy/nauseous but that would be pedantic and clinical, and this album disembowels pedantry. Clinical, maybe, but only in the way a gore-fueled serial killer is clinical. By that I mean there’s body parts spewed all over the clinic and the floor is both sticky and slippery. Thirty-three minutes of unhinged, manic riffs blast through your ears and do all kinds of unsavory things to your brain. It might not be safe to listen to this album too many times, and physical copies should be locked behind the counter, sold only to those with a licensed history of mental illness. Which makes how melodic and musical Mike Flory’s solos are so surprising. In addition to everything else that makes Stitch by Stitch a top-100 lister, the solo brings it into the top 50.
The murderous theater doesn’t stop at multi-vocal narrative and knife-toothed riffing. Cartilage went so far to tell their story they’ve got little samples dotting the album that sound like a very amateur production of a poorly written play whose director wants to get fired. It’s got a b-level actress way too young to be acting as someone’s mother, heavy breathing, movie jump scares (A Lymphatic Labyrinth of Roiling Rot, whose central riff sounds like two blood-soaked children holding hands while happily skipping down the hall), a monster allowing a doctor to inspect a body, and an ominous welcoming to your doom. Topping the show off, Among the Offal goes Saturday-morning deranged, vocal lines chopping away at a Mother Goose tetrameter that sounds like taunting, playground rhymes, similar to Sarcófago’s anthem “Sex Drinks and Metal” or numerous Haemorrhage songs, and follows it up with a machine-gun riff that just spatters innards everywhere. Then Anatomical Incantations kicks it up a notch. Again, gleefully. There’s an unsettlingly big grin on the face here.
Cartilage are one little –sen away from being handed a civil defamation suit from New Jersey, and I’d bet they’d dance into court covered in their stained, spiked uniforms. Operating Altar isn’t original enough to reach greatness, but it isn’t trying to be. There’s nothing run-of-the-sawmill about it: it’s a rusty, tetanus-infested playground of lunacy. Operating Altar is Cartilage’s most identifying work and it’s great fun to listen to, so long as you define fun as getting your teeth kicked in by slaughterful riffs and gremlin theater.
(3.5 / 5)
