The Belgian death squad known as ABORTED is back with their fifth album, Slaughter & Apparatus. While many would have thrown in the towel after losing their entire lineup, vocalist Sven DeCaluwe has survived, in the process delivering ABORTED’s most focused record to date. Expanding on the mid-tempo grooves and breakdowns of its predecessor, The Archaic Abattoir, Slaughter & Apparatus showcases the band’s ability to combine those elements with technical intensity and speed while still managing to create memorable hooks within a death metal framework. “Avenious,” “The Spaying Séance,” and “Archetype” offer prime examples of this, with each song shifting back and forth between blinding speed and straightforward, punchy riffing to thick, sludgy half-time grooves with fluid accuracy. Slaughter & Apparatus also offers up the band’s most musical leads to date on each of the album’s tracks but most prominently on “The Foul Nucleus of Resurrection” and “Underneath Rorulent Soil.” Lyrically, the band spews forth tales of incisions, cadavers, mutilations and lacerations with morbid glee, but at least the band doesn’t take themselves too seriously. How else can you explain “Prolific Murder Contrivance” in which the band is “canning up head-souffle” or the outro to “Spaying Seance” in which the band found a way for “urethral carnage - aberrant gynaecol” to sound catchy? Long cited for sounding a little to close to CARCASS for comfort, many moments on the album don’t help their case much in that regard, but the band has taken significant steps in separating themselves from the rest of the CARCASS clones. And hell, if Jeff Walker (who sings on two tracks) gives them his blessing, who cares? 2007’s finest death metal release thus far. (Century Media Records)