Archives: Reviews

1) Sons of Famine 2) Maggot Lamb 3) Waste 4) Seas of Excrememnt 5) Mind Scabs 6) Gathering Chemical Children 7) Seeping Dismay 8) Death Meddle 9) Crawling Visions 10) Nothing

“Raping the Ears of Those Above” non è un album che si colloca facilmente ne’ all’interno della nuova scuola ne’ della vecchia scuola Death Metal… tecnicamente ineccepibile, è un album che si evolve in continuazione, con migliaia di riff, tempi di batteria assurdi, vagamente SUFFOCATION in alcuni punti, eppure senza mai sfociare in un a kermesse di suoni incoerenti. A guidicare dalla lunghezza e dalla complessità dei pezzi si può valutare che questo album non è stato partorito in dieci minuti, alcuni pezzi li avevo già sentiti su un paio di loro demo di qualche anno fa, rivisitati e ripuliti per l’occasione. Voce gutturale, e un suono decisamente moderno, eppure in questo album si percepisce una varietà e una freschezza tipica del Death Metal più incontaminato, con lunghi passaggi di ampio respiro, non prettamente “atmosferici” ma cadenziati così da spezzare il ritmo tra un blastbeat e l’altro. Brutal Death tecnico e massiccio, mai a velocità impossibili ma decisamente evoluto. Molto Buooono.

1 - Pear Of Anguish 2 - Dearly Beheaded 3 - Funeral In F# 4 - Executive Onslaught 5 - Toxic Bowel Manoeuvre 6 - Sulphuric Semen 7 - Symptoms Of Accrued Transgression 8 - Sorrow In Adornment 9 - Coat Hanger Massacre

Once more I got an incomplete promo, hand written Cdr with color xeroxed cover, but this time it annoys me a bit since this band is from Lebanon, and the lyrics according the their homepage, were written about the politic and social problems of that country, They might have been an interesting read for once. Whatever. The cover art here looks real neat, it’s made of pictures retouched and combined to create a vaguely McKean-esque effect. Hands with knifes protruding from a head, all covered with scratches and thick exressionist brushstrokes. The result is really cool, especially the use of reddish colors to create the idea of a vibrant insanity. Cheerio to Mike Bohatch for this work, I just hope he was aware of the way this logo and title were placed on his work. An artist would probably have gone for something less invasive. Whatever. I think the main issue with the genre this band plays is that tigthness and density is completely fundamental. Now that’s exactly my problem with this “Applied Schizophrenic Science”; first off the album suffers from a indistinct production, it lacks some cohesion becouse the vocals are really too high and the drums tend to fall behind, so basically you lose some of the combined force this might have had. Second, the high vocals have no big punch, not completely flat like Anatomy, but not aggressive enough to match the brutal guitar sound. And third: the arrangements themselves are not that compact, I know this seems to be one of the genres Americans have an extra token for, but some bands like Severe Torture here in Europe and neighbouring countries have succeeded in creating a personal style while laying on the American tested framework. Other than that, this Oath to Vanquish is fundamentally a Death Metal band with very deep vocals alternating with very high ones, vaguely dissonant slow bridges, some touches of loose, fast melodies and a decent personal sound. Neither the power chords nor the loose progressions have a real priority here and the band shifts often between different approaches, which either gives variety to the songs but also deprives it of some identity. All in all I am at the third listen of this Cd and yet I cannot decide if I like it or not. What’s sure I’d like to slide out the high vocals from the mix before saying anything more. I think we were not completely ready for a full album here, it’s just a bit undecided, neither brutal nor experimental (and definitely not grind, what’s the idea of grindcore for these people writing reviews?). I’ll maybe give it another try in a few months.

1 - Auriga 2 - The Angel's Invective 3 - Ritual 4 - Over The Lethe 5 - Pestilent Hands 6 - Emissary Of Night 7 - The Daemon 8 - Ghost Of Sorrow

I cannot be mild when records like this arrive to my doorstep for review. This thing just suck. Modern black metal kids might call it black metal, but for sure this has none of the elements that made Black Metal a form of extreme evil art. First off, the recording is way too synthetic: the drums sound as if they’ve been triggered heavily and the effect that comes out is that of a plastic drum machine. The vocals are just shrieky and not evil, chilling or frightening or whatever at all, not to mention enormously flat, just a constant fuzz. The riffs are not loose like Dark Throne but more like Thrash Metal riffs with a very few intermezzos of melodic Norwegian feel (like early Satyricon, Emperor etc), and thsi especially true for the last tracks taken from their split with Sin Origin so basically this comes out sounding like a mumble jumble of elements hardly mix. The lyrics are about mythology and they’re rather well written, and the packaging too might have been good, since they used classic paintings and sculptures as a base but it seems Blackmetal.com has the bad habit of placing a horrible embossing effect even of gothic fonts (omg!). There is some sparce use of sytnths here, sometimes used to create the effect of a Gregorian shorus, but it is placed just so badly that you have the impression of an accidental overdub. There is little to save here. I’d like to use Fenriz’s words: “You call your metal Black but it’s just lame and weak”. Come on, do people really like this stuff?

1 - Cycles of Tyranny 2 - Overbearing Filth 3 - Permanence 4 - Crushing The Reviled 5 - Hollow Silence 6 - Puncture Festival 7 - Vanquished 8 - Human Thought/ Into the Unlight 9 - Fictional Discipline 10 - Twat Squash 11 - A Bitter End 12 - L.S.S. 13 - Dead of a Winter Cold 14 - Dementia

Wasteform is a band that plays that kind of super-compressed chugging Brutal Death standing in between the heavier

breakdowns of Dying Fetus and early Skinless, plus some wicked harmonics that add a sense of weirdness to the mix.

However the effect I get is more of something sounding like Rotting and earlier Jungle Rot, that is, stuff that’s

boring me on the long run. If there is a sense of heaviness in these power riffs I am not getting it completely,

this might be the same case with Revenance. While the band has some accelerations and dissonand chords that make

them souding a bit more evoluted, the basis is obviously that of classic NY slam-Death, with that super fat guitar

sound and the metallic distorted bass-string touch which Skinless perfected in the late nineties. I read that the

band members all come from an Hard Core background and indeed the good thing is that there are no metal rides here,

but mostly beefy guitar riffs and guttural vocals with a good angry tonality. While this is by no means sleepy or

aimless, and I mean the songs are structured well and played with flawless precision, the point is I am not in a

mood of listening to this kind of bands lately. Sometimes Wasteform pounds and hits hard but mostly we’re a bit out

of synch, there is just too much music bridging between the vocal lines and being no musician, I prefer to hear the

roaring beast crack and roll a bit more. Technical, heavy and with a good dose of disharmonious tremolo picking,

this is probably a good choice for lovers of heavy riffs and neat, clean sounds, but mostly for players that can

read between the lines. I dunno, I just don’t get the punch in the stomach that I got from earlier Skinless… and

that dissonant twists are just nonessentials to me. Add more meat and skip the sauce, please.

The packaging looks fine, blood encrusted and with some gleaming metal edges, not properly readable all the time,

but lloking fine. This album is actually a second pressing plus 2006 demo tracks (10-14), check them at the end, becouse

there is definitely something good going on there.

Oh my I just read that the album’s first press was even

PRODUCED by Sherwood of Skinless. Gotcha!

1 - Eleven 2 - Fallacy of Reason 3 - Karmic Impediment 4 - Heteronomy of the Will 5 - Concentric Diversions 6 - Predestined to Persevere 7 - Order from Chaos 8 - Synoptical Incoherence 9 - Nescientia

No matter how technical, uptempo, dissonant or intricate this band decides to play, I really find no way to like it. Emeth is that kind of generational band who seems to be raised with Meshuggah and Human Remains on headphones. As much as Human Remains proposed something fresh and terribly disquieting years ago, Emeth just succeeded in boring me to death. They play some kind of Brutal Death Metal with lots of disharmonious chords, a mid range vocals a bit in the vein of later Pyrexia, and complex tempo changes. What’s definitely missing here, is sheer force. The Death Metal brutality. They just make flat noise without being able to recreate the punishing wall of sound that defines American Brutal Death, so in the end this band results as being hopelessly average and boring as any of those emo-postcore bands that stemmed from Dillinger Escape Plan (what a fucking gay music is that). If you don0t have the fat, churning sound and guttural push, I really see no much to like it this genre. In my language they would call them “fighetti”. This is one of those bands that stay diametrically opposite to the real Brutal Death of the southern American slums. Nicely polished and clean, with homework like drum bridges, and all that glossy shit made for big magazines. Not as bad as late Necrophagist, but definitely not my kind of Death Metal. They also assumed that shifting vocals a few octaves up would be enough to make them more “Hard Core”, but this is definitely not the case. Intellectual stuff that bored me to agony. I can’t tell much about the packaging but the cover art is discrete, conceptual work on mathematical madness, seems like that guy from Aborted‘s work. Computer graphics that suits finely this stuff. The song titles also seem to be Meshuggah-inspired, so basically the concept is followed to the letter in detail. Haven’t read the lyrics but I can imagine what they’re about. Well at least they don’t have Anata-like haircuts (ah ah ah, they always make me laugh).

1 - Raped for Rent 2 - Gore Epitomite 3 - Seven19 4 - Deviant Pleasures 5 - The Cumming of the Trilogy 6 - Exibition of Carnage 7 - Used, Abused and Left for Dead 8 - Hero of Dementia 9 - No Time for Lube 10 - Stench of Virginity 11 - The Urge to Splurge 12 - Bound in Skin 13 - Phallic Beat Down

My opinion of Lividity has had its up and downs ever since their earlier days. I found their debut on Ablated a terribly average and sleepy album, and I promised myself to ignore the band ever then after. When I got their “‘Til Only the Sick Remains” Cd in distro however, I was surprised by how good the band had become while I wasn’t seeing, their sound was morbidly obscure and sick, with a barking, muffled vocal singing and slow bridges bordering on doom. There was a saturated, muddy sound which gave that release a sickly fascinating feel. With this new album, my opinion on the band comes again to question. I have no cover nor lyrics to judge so I’ll go directly to the point of reviewing the music: the band has made another strong turn and now plays a way more technical, intrinsecally complex Death Metal with a constant double vocal blast. The drums are way more articulated, fitting this new looser, faster style but this guy Varela from Lust of Decay also brought with him that band’s intolerably mechanical sound so these beats are really on the verge of sounding like coming from a programmed drum machine. Luckily however, the rest of the music is not just a scattered collection of chugging riffs or we might have had another Steinberg Cubase metal band which, please, let’s avoid. I have had enough of Insidious Decrepancy. While the reviews I read that were talking about a “grindcore” approach were obviously either made by mongoloids or by experienceless teenagers, the guitars here have indeed some good solid hooks, with good loose riffs and a hammering metallic distorted bass. The double vocals are in the vein of earlier Deicide but again this is the style that the band adopted since its very beginnings, shifting from porcine growls to the usual screamin’. It is intersting to hear how neither of the vocal styles is predomeimant, they just share the stage fifty-fifty. You pretty much already now what this band is about: Porn Brutal Death with a couple of hard mosh parentheses but basically staying loyal to the earlier days of American Brutal Death. The fact that these guys didn’t grow up only listening to Deeds of Flesh becomes obvious since the songs have a clear, consistent matrix and you can basically tell each of them from the other. Sometimes endless brutality is cool but having real songs to hear is generally speaking much better. Lividity once again delivers solid Brutal Death even if this time they took time to do everything so much cleaner and more ordered. Too bad I am much more into lo-fi sewage sounds, I really enjoyed their previous album better. Some songs, like “The Urge to Splurge” are demo material re-recorded, yet with this new more modern sound.

6 - Feasting on Flesh 7 - Cannibalistic Horror 8 - Conquistador Exhumato

Terrorism plays a different brand of old school noisy and grinding Death Metal, with a totally fucked up crass sound; it hardly sounds like something recorded in 2005, and I tell this with appreciation. The vocals are not deep but more like phlegmy croaks which ooze malignancy and sometimes sound as if paired with a deeper one to create a layered, more wrapping sound. The songs follow the classic formula of three riffs and variation, and the drummer also plays straight and neat with no frills, battering the snare drums when things become faster and keeping a simple pace otherwise, sometimes it’s just good to hear bands that concentrate on the riffs alone instead of looking for variations. Song lyrics deals with serial killers and cannibals (the third one is in Spanish I guess… no clue), so the name Terrorirsm sounds a bit like a weird choice, was this for shock value? Whatever. The sound of these tracks is garageish, cragged and completely abrasive, which sound in tune with the splatterish music. There is probably some very early Impetigo worship in here as well. Simple and to the point, noisy and inspired by some grincore, this is a cool sincere release to hear with the right spirit.