UMUR "Mutilation of the Past" is the debut demo cassette tape by Swedish death metal act Excruciate. The demo was released in a very limited number of copies (including 100 on red tape) in April 1990. Excruciate were a rather short-lived act and besides demos and a split they only released the "Passage of Life (1993)" full-length studio album before disbanding.

"Mutilation of the Past" is a 6 track (the first track is an intro, which interestingly enough is a spoken sample taken from "Cyborg". The post-apocalyptic motion picture from 1989, which among others features Jean-Claude Van Damme), 24:09 minutes long demo, and with that much material on a demo, the listener is given a good opportunity to learn what Excruciate are about. But that´s actually apparent already after listening to the first "real" track on the album "Eternal Incubation". This is old school Swedish death metal to the core. Brutal and raw but still with enough memorable catchy moments to never drown in brutality. The band are relatively well playing, the growling vocals convincing and aggressive and the songwriting, while still a bit imature, is pretty decent too. The shifts between sections are a bit awkward though, but that wasn´t unusual for the genre in those days.

The sound production is dark, murky and reeks of rehearsal room atmosphere, but considering the fact that "Mutilation of the Past" was probably recorded on a 4 or an 8 track tape recorder, the band have actually created a pretty good sound, where it´s only occasionally hard to distinguish the instruments/vocals from each other.

"Mutilation of the Past" isn´t a revelation by any means, but it could prove interesting to fans of old school Swedish death metal, interested in listening to an authentic recording from the golden age of death metal. A 3 star (60%) rating is fair.