Christopher Lee - Charlemagne: The Omens of Death

Let's not yank each others' chains here

I'M SORRY, IT'S JUST NOT VERY GOOD

Really, I respect the absolute shit out of Christopher Lee, the guy is an incredible actor and has done more in his lifetime than I will ever do in my next six lifetimes, but... man he just can not do this.  So many people are just ejaculating with glee over the fact that Saruman is 91 years old and releasing metal albums, but I think they're just letting some of the extraordinarily glaring flaws get swept under the rug.  It's the same phenomenon we saw with The Devil You Know, where people fell absurdly in love with it simply because Dio, Iommi, and Butler were reunited and pushing like, six hundred years old apiece, and ignored the fact that only four of the ten songs are really engaging in any way (heresy, I know, but it's just really boring). 

There are three huge problems with the second in the Charlemagne saga, The Omens of Death, and thankfully one of them isn't the production.  By the Sword and the Cross suffered from one of the hands down most comically botched production jobs I'd ever heard.  Lee's vocals were approximately fifteen times louder than anything else, and the guitar sounded like somebody humming in another room, it was just a complete wreck.  Thankfully, people seemed to know what they were doing this time around, as it all sounds much more like a real album.  The guitars are still pretty muffled, which is kinda lame, but this clearly wasn't meant to be a guitar focused album, so I suppose it's not really a big deal.

But no, one of the three huge problems is just that the songwriting is unbearably bland.  Really, for a power metal fan, you've already heard this album back in 2002.  All the common trappings are present, from the choirs that are nice but kinda fall flat and aren't as epic as they should be, the most unimaginative riffs ever, a drummer who knows a grand total of two patterns (both just really standard beat keeping, Lars Ulrich level stuff), and attempts at catchy melodies and big soaring choruses.  Almost every song feels about three minutes longer than it actually is, and it's just because it's all so goddamn boring. I wish I could go into more detail but it's not really possible.  It's extraordinarily standard power metal with less bombast than one would hope for from a project with this much ambition.  Stale riffs and stale compositions, nothing to see here.  If there's any shining bright spot with the music, it's that it oftentimes reminds me of the music from Dynasty Warriors 4 (check out the end of "The Ultimate Sacrifice", tell me that isn't straight away worthy of being the theme over the credits).

Another gaping fissure in the album is actually the main draw itself.  I'm sorry, Christopher Lee's vocals are fucking horrible.  He just narrates, which is all well and good normally, he has a great narration voice, but he tries singing frequently, and he's just bad at it.  He's an old man, and he has an old man voice, and after 91 years of kicking ass, he just doesn't have the physical ability to be singing these big, booming baritone parts that he's aiming for.  Remember back in my Kelly McKee review how I lambasted his vocals for sounding like he was just changing his tone while talking?  Yeah, sad to say this about one of the most influential and well respected (and just downright most talented) actors of the past century, but Christopher Lee here does the exact same thing.  Apparently he used to sing back in the day, I haven't heard that stuff, but right here, right now, he's incapable of doing what he's trying to do.  It's admirable, but it still sucks.  The best parts vocally are without a doubt the choirs, since they don't involve Lee's voice, and they're one of the only times we get to hear exuberant voices instead of tired old man storytelling or lazy guest vocals.  Yeah, even the guest vocals, by technically accomplished opera singers, are just boring as hell.  All of the vocals sound sedated, and it's a chore to listen to.

The last problem though, is by far my favorite, and I didn't even realize it until I was halfway done with this review.  Whilst talking to a friend about it, I noted that the vocals seemed to not match at all, like they were off-tempo, and there were even parts where it sounded digitally sped up (like the middle of "Charles the Great").  His response to this observation is still making my head spin, several days later.  "Well that's because there are basically no new vocals on this album, they're all the same parts from the first Charlemagne album".

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!

I'm sorry, I don't give a single shit if you're Dracula or Saruman or an ex-WWII spy or a real life knight or a nonagenarian, this is fucking lazy and inexcusable.  The Omens of Death is, for all intents and purposes, a heavy metal remix of his first album, By the Sword and the Cross.  I've seen almost no mention of this around the internet, in promotional material or interviews, and even Lee himself states: "The first Charlemagne album is metal, of course, but what I sang was more symphonic".  Ironic then that the music has been made heavier but his vocals are literally unchanged.  It's hard to forget "I SHED THE BLOOD OF THE SAXON MAN" when it's repeated ten squillion times across two separate albums.  I'm on to you, you dastardly old codger.  This is fucking sheisty and dishonest, and I, for one, don't tolerate underhanded laziness, even from one of the most accomplished men out there.  The songs all have new titles and are arranged differently, and there's no mention from Lee that the first three quarters of the album provide nothing new from him, so yeah, I'm calling bullshit on it.  I feel like most people haven't even noticed since, let's be honest, nobody listened to that first album.  I know I certainly only heard a few samples and decided to stay away, what about the rest of you?  Yeah, that's what I thought.  The last handful of songs are new apparently, but they suffer from all the same problems as the first batch; boring instrumentals, sedated vocals from an old man with a whopping three semitone range, and a general feeling of disconnect between Lee and the rest of the band.

This is a trainwreck, through and through.  There's almost nothing I like about it, from the dull arrangements to the wimpy riffs to the uninspired melodies to Lee himself, almost every component falls flat.  I like what Lee was trying to do, and it's very inspiring to see such a respected actor with a passion for something as juvenile as power metal when he's old enough to have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, but let's face it, a lazy vanity project isn't going to give metal any more legitimacy as a style of music nor an artform.  The Omens of Death is bad enough as a standalone, but the added insult of Lee not even doing so much as recording new vocals or writing new lyrics for a vast majority of the album is just absolutely ludicrous.  Yeah, after all he's done, he's earned the right to relax a little bit, but I retain my right to call him out on it when it results in a shitty final product.  At the very, very least, Hedras Ramos does a great job with what he's given, and his solos are generally very cool, but they aren't enough to save the album.  In fact, Ramos couldn't save a game of Final Fantasy if the entire game took place within a save point and the only command in battle was "save" and the game was called Final Fantasy: Save Point.


RATING - 15%

Insomnium - Since the Day It All Came Down

From now on, there's an absence of smile

Insomnium is pretty close to the most overrated band ever.  I'm astonished at how high their average scores are at MA, and I know some people who just mercilessly ejaculate over everything they do, and it drives me up the fucking wall.  They're melodeath with no riffs and mainly just sad melodies, ooooooh!  The vocals are usually pretty great but when it comes to this particular little subniche of melodeath, I prefer the more triumphant side like Amon Amarth.

And yet, here I am, adding another high score onto the pile, and that has a lot to do with what makes Insomnium work in the first place, they're a mood music, and there really isn't much better when you're in the right mood.  And right now?  I'm damn sure in the right fucking mood.

What mood is that, you ask, dear reader?  Fucking soul crushing depression, that's what.  Since the Day It All Came Down is pretty much my soundtrack to wandering aimlessly around the forest for hours at night, silently praying that I step in a bear trap and get eaten by a fox instead of having to return to civilization and daylight again.  The title track is the song I hear in my head when I'm standing at the edge of the metaphorical cliff, just basking in the last moments of life before I finally reach the triumph of nothingness.  This is a paradoxically energetic take on the concepts of loss and loneliness, and it works in a way I would have never expected it to work.  It's just gloomy melodeath with a surprising amount of variety with an abundance of acoustic passages and a very, very heavy focus on melody.  This is just an overload of emotion and melancholy, painted over the canvas of generally mid paced melodeath.

This goes against everything I look for and appreciate in music, really.  I like my music to be fun, I like to enjoy fast and energetic stuff, it's why I pimp Slayer and Gamma Ray and Vader and Municipal Waste so much even though they're some of the most popular bands in the genre.  Insomnium is about as close as you can get to being completely opposite without turning into doom or sludge or some shit.  Most of Since the Day It All Came Down moves along at a very deliberate pace, with special care put into every note and every lyric, and it emphasizes the melancholic mood and atmosphere of the whole thing.  Quite a far cry from the rip roaring frenzy I normally prefer to listen to.  That's not to say there aren't high tempo moments, most notably the climaxes of the title track and "Under the Plaintive Sky", but the majority of the runtime is taken up by midpaced melodies and acoustic passages.  And I hate to be an artsy fartsy "why can't Cannibal Corpse write death metal as beautiful as Opeth?" tool... but goddammit Insomnium write some fucking gorgeous music.  At not one point in the record do I think the melodies fall flat, or that the pacing is off, or that the atmosphere isn't effective, none of that.  I'll admit to not being entirely familiar with all of Insomnium's work, but the biggest difference I can notice is that the vocals are slightly better on some later albums (being deeper and more full sounding than here), but otherwise the band clearly had their signature sound pegged down by now.  I don't know how you can make music, much less something based in metal, actually sound like the embodiment of despair and loneliness, but they manage to nail it here (yeah yeah I've never listened to Katatonia or My Dying Bride, sue me).

Since the Day It All Came Down is pitch dark, and slathered in moodiness.  The bright spots shine in the more overtly gorgeous moments, but for the most part the relatively clear lyrics and strong melodies carry you into a pit and then leave you there to rot.   Niilo's vocals are remarkably clear for having such a deep, booming growl, and it helps that the lyrics are surprisingly well written as well, expertly conveying the themes of loss and sorrow to the listener.  I do have a problem with the clean vocals that pop up from time to time though, as they pretty heartily fail to be emotional and instead just kind of sound like a deep voiced guy kind of rambling in the background.  That aside, the keys and acoustics of the album really probably add the most to the whole package, but the big climaxes that surface in places like "Song of the Forlorn Son", "Closing Words", "Under the Plaintive Sky", and especially the opening title track are the most memorable and powerful moments on the album.  Shit, singling out those four songs is a bit of an injustice to the other seven.  This is stunningly consistent in its songwriting and its quality.  If you like one song, you're probably going to like them all.  They're all big, ambitious melodeath songs with no real riffs to speak of, merely focusing on really basic rhythm patterns underneath deep Johan Hegg-esque growls with soaring melodies that manage to be both triumphant, beautiful, and sorrowful at the same time.  All this coupled with a perfectly crippling atmosphere makes for an album that, while not perfect, does enough right to make me not really care about the small flaws like the clean vocals/whispers.  When I'm not in the mood, I'll never put this on, but when I am, it's the best album ever.  The atmosphere is just nearly flawless in its scope and execution.

That's really what makes this work, the atmsophere, the mood.  The feeling of this album is impeccable, and the entire time it's on, I may physically be sitting on my laptop drinking tap water that tastes suspiciously like celery, but in my mind I'm sitting with my feet dangling idly over a cliff, above a beautiful scene, looking back on my life and friends and family and loves with teary eyed reverence.  Since the Day It All Came Down transports me to another world, where there is only me and endless wilderness.  Nothing else matters, I'm just about to return to the dirt, like we all do someday, and I'm looking back at the beauty of what my life once was, and lamenting the fact that all the beauty is gone from myself.  The world is a splendorous place, full of wonder and majesty, and yet in my own mind, it's monochrome and dry.  There's nothing left for me but to just ruminate on what I had before I lost it.  How I lost it doesn't matter, the point is that it's gone, my world is empty apart from myself, the lush landscape which taunts me with its vibrancy, and the overwhelming weight of sorrow and despair on my shoulders.  The soothing sound of the waters in the forest creek and the rustling of the leaves in the wind is what permeates my psyche and reminds me that there is beauty in the world, but it is no longer mine to coexist with.  With this final breath, I stand up at the edge of this cliff, close my eyes, and smile as I allow the gentle breeze to give me the subtle motivation to finally succeed at what I'd consistently failed at in life...

I put my best foot forward.


RATING - 90%

Evile - Skull

*yawn*

Isn't it incredible how quickly Evile went from one of the pet "they're gonna be huge someday" rethrash acts from the early days of the surge to "oh man they still exist?"?  Yeah it's true, Evile seems to reap commercial success and consistently chart with each new album (a huge rarity for metal bands) and yet I still don't know a single person who still listens to them.  They entered the game with the groundbreaking new idea of "play like Metallica, sing like Slayer" at a time when everybody was doing exactly that, but they seemed to break from the mold by being a little more Master of Puppets and less Kill 'em All.  Basically they're the band that Trivium wished they could be, and that was about the extent of it.  I sang the praises of Enter the Grave when it was new, but that probably had more to do with the fact that I really bought into the whole rethrash scene when in first emerged (when it was still called neo thrash), and less to do with how much staying power it actually had (I even considered Merciless Death, one of the absolute worst bands of the style, among the best back then); because looking back, it doesn't have a whole lot going for it apart from "Thrasher", "First Blood", and "Armoured Assault".  I skipped the next two albums due to a lack of interest, but now here I sit with the band's fourth album, the not-so-excitingly-titled Skull.

Eh, this is pretty much the same problem the band had way back in the beginning, one or two good songs scattered about a ton of utterly forgettable ones.  This is frustrating because the skill is certainly there, every once in a while the band can just unexpectedly crap out a very intense or memorable riff (like "Underworld" or "Outsider"), but most of the time seem totally content to just pump out the same dozen Metallica throwaways that wouldn't stick with the listener if they were covered in velcro.  Tracks like "Head of the Demon" and "The Naked Sun" just fucking plod on and on and on and never seem to end.  Most of the tracks here seem to be much thrashier takes on the speed rock numbers of The Black Album like "Through the Never" and "Of Wolf and Man", never once doubting their roots in pure thrash but also never doing anything remotely engaging.  And when they're not romping through midpaced snoozers, the tempo is usually very high and the performances very energetic.  This is when the band is at their best, when they're just roaring through high octane rippers, unleashing all that piss and vinegar they're clearly still so full of.  But no, instead we get bad "Sanitarium" knockoffs like "Tomb", because clearly that is what people want more of.  I mean really, if you can show me somebody who believes "Battery" would be better if the intro took four minutes and doubled as a two minute outro, with the time in between being midpaced, I'll show you somebody you clearly just made up to try to prove me wrong.  Dick.

I was being a little facetious earlier when I said Evile was just doing the same thing as everybody else.  Honestly, I'd reckon about 90% of the rethrash bands out there exclusively rip off Exodus, Slayer, or Kreator.  The world actually has relatively few Metallica knockoffs (really, it's like Evile, early Testament and... I dunno, Xentrix?), so Evile does stand out a bit from the crowd for that reason alone.  It's unfortunate because the band is undoubtedly at their best when they're doing exactly what I commend them for not doing.  When they play super fast and angry and violent and end up sounding like Slayer or Coma of Souls era Kreator, that's when they churn out the most enjoyable and memorable music.  "Underworld" and "Outsider" are without a doubt the best tracks on display.  It's not even close.  That's when Matt and Ol Drake's razor sharp riffing skills get the opportunity to shine.  Matt's Araya impression has apparently morphed over time to more closely resemble the newer sound of Chuck Billy, which I again don't have a problem with.  Say what you will about the quality of Testament's music, Billy has always had a great voice if nothing else.

I get what Evile was trying to do here, I actually respect them a ton for trying to mix it up and not be yet another faceless, one dimensional thrash rehash.  This isn't like Guillotine or Amoricide or Hatchery or any other of the virtually nameless retreads out there, I can still hear this and say "Yup, this is certainly an Evile album!"  They spread the tempo across the board, and it's a commendable effort, but the problem is that they fall short whenever it dips below "furiously fast".  There are only a handful of songs where they do this, and a grand total of two where it keeps up from start to finish.  This is gonna have to be a shorter review for me because at the end of the day, Skull is a pretty shallow album and I've already touched on every worthwhile point.  For all the brainless, no-creativity rethrash bands out there, you could do a whole lot worse than Evile, but I still wouldn't recommend them to anybody outside of Metallica diehards or people who really, really loved The Crusade for some reason.


RATING - 40%

Chidren of Bodom - Halo of Blood

EFFORT!  HONEST TO GOD EFFORT!

Over the years, I've managed to review five of Bodom's then-current seven albums (don't read the first four of them, for your sanity's sake).  They're not a band I ever really set out to constantly cover, but when a band is as important to me as this one is/was, and when said band finds themselves on such a consistently downwards slide, it's hard not to pipe up every time they disappoint you.  I maintain, even after all these years, that Follow the Reaper is one of the most important albums in my development as a metal fan, helping ease me from the HerPeS-only mindset into more and more extreme metal thanks to my eventual acclimation with Alexi Laiho's frenzied yowling.  The vocals and lyrics have always technically sucked, but the level of enthusiasm was so high that it never mattered.  It fit perfectly and just the sheer amount of fun the band was having with the light melodies and preposterously wanky dueling solos rubbed off on the listener.  That all changed with Are You Dead Yet?, which focused more on heavy chugging and less on guitar/keyboard theatrics and fast paced and fun melodies.  Ever since then, the band has been on the steady decline, releasing three crappy mostly-melodeath albums with wretched lyrics, banal, insipid jokes for cover tracks, and just really lazy songwriting.  Years and years we fans have put up with the band just not giving a single fuck about anything, churning out brainless albums every few years, collecting a paycheck, spending it all on booze, and then making another shitty album to pay for their next supply of booze.

And then 2013 rolls around, and queue in Halo of Blood, the band's eighth album.  Right off the bat, the aesthetics felt kinda different.  The last three (bad) albums had all portrayed Roy in a more straightforward and vicious light, rife with menacing poses and gory splatter, whereas the earlier albums I love so much always seemed to portray the embodiment of death in a more romantic, mysterious light.  Compare:

Death be not proud...

I DON'T GIVE A FLYING FUCK MOTHERFUCKER!

Clearly two massively different approaches to both their aesthetics and their music itself.  Halo of Blood rolls around and suddenly it looks much more subdued.  The palette is very predominately white (which could symbolize something lighter than previous, less dark), with the trademark Grim Reaper looking down remorsefully upon a frozen lake; where the snow has been brushed away you can see the water is packed with screaming victims, frozen under the surface.  This is intriguing, this piques my interest.  That romanticized take on death that used to counteract the band's youthful exuberance is so much more interesting than the last three albums which simply reaffirm the band's juvenile nature. 

But moving past that... yeah, the throwback artwork is 100% indicative of the sound to be found on Halo of Blood.  I could not be happier for what this album is, I really couldn't.  The fifteen year old version of myself wet himself with happiness merely two tracks in.  This is the true successor to Hate Crew Deathroll, ten sad years after the fact.  As far as I'm concerned, this album just erased two and a half albums worth of ill will that Bodom had built up.  Relentless Reckless Forever, Blooddrunk, and all but about three-ish songs on Are You Dead Yet? no longer exist to me.  Bodom's drug fueled mishaps of the mid-late 00s were all just some strange hallucinatory fever dream I had.  They never sucked!  Hooray!

The important thing is that the music is good, right?  Well, this album finally one-ups its predecessors by actually doing just that, making good music.  The opening track, "Waste of Skin", utilizes a main melody quite similar to "Hate Me" from the stellar Follow the Reaper, and just revels in this lighthearted melody that the band used to always throw around in abundance.  This is the throwback we've been waiting for, one that came straight from the heart, not the wallet.  This is loaded with tracks that wouldn't sound out of place on the band's third or fourth albums ("Waste of Skin", "Bodom Blue Moon", "One Bottle and a Knee Deep", "All Twisted"), and this is the sound that I and countless other fans have been pining for for roughly ten years now.  I feel like, somewhere down the line, Bodom got a wake up call of sorts.  I'm not sure what or where or how, but the band collectively realized that they just weren't connecting like they used to, and had to think about how to stir up the passion within their fans again. The trick was to just... just try again.  It's clear to me that the band wasn't didn't really have their heart in the last two albums, as they all just seemed to kind of go through the motions.  Halo of Blood feels like the band is pouring themselves into the writing process again.  They're having fun again, and for the first time in years, so am I.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that there are a wide array of influences at work, but there are indeed a few different moments.  Most notable is the nearly Dissection-esque meloblack influence in the title track, which ranks among the fastest songs the band has ever written.  I'm most pleased with the fact that Bodom went back to doing what they did best, but that doesn't mean I don't also appreciate them trying something new (mostly because it works, as opposed to the last three albums of new ideas).  There are a few bum spots as well, since there are still some minor holdover from the chuggy days with "Damage Beyond Repair".  And yet again we have one of their kinda-trademarked terrible slow songs here in "Dead Man's Hand on You".  Really, does anybody honestly prefer the slow Bodom songs like "Angels Don't Kill" or "Banned from Heaven" over "Towards Dead End" or "Kissing the Shadows"?  If you do, I've got a fiver on you also preferring the doomy Overkill songs, you freak of nature.  The point is that they're an inherently energetic band, so toning it down really doesn't do them any favors.  It's like Stone Cold Steve Austin hosting a cooking show where he never once puts a crowd member through a table or Stone Cold Stunners Rachel Ray, it's a situation wherein the band/host isn't playing to their strengths.  "Scream for Silence" does the same thing, but it's got a better pace and moves along well enough to not be too irritating (though the main melody has a really obviously flat note that seems completely out of place, which is irritating since it repeats so much). 

But with those quibbles aside, there isn't a whole lot I dislike about Halo of Blood.  It's the best kind of reversion I could have ever asked for.  The keys are back in a relatively prominent role (much more so than the fuck all they did on Blooddrunk), ripping through overindulgent solo battles with Laiho's lead guitar just like the old days, along with providing melodies over the verses and such.  "All Twisted" and "One Bottle and a Knee Deep" are great examples of this hearkening back to the glory days.  He still doesn't let loose as much as he does for Warmen, but he does finally get some more opportunities to exercise those wacky spiderfingers of his.  After several, several listens, I still can't tell if the lyrics are as drop dead derpy as they always have been, but to the album's credit, there aren't any titles as fucknards stupid as "Northpole Throwdown" this time around, and I'm not hearing "YOW" at the beginning of every single song nor "FUCK" at every sixth word, so it seems like Laiho has finally, finally learned how to write lyrics.  There's a good possibility I'm wrong though, feel free to point out any horrid examples I may have missed.  Even the cover song is good again.  I mean think about it, early on the band was covering Iron Maiden, Stone, and W.A.S.P., and then around the time they started getting shitty, they started covering Britney Spears, Kenny Rogers, and Eddie Murphy.  Their cover song has always been a good indicator of their attitude at the time, and they morphed from musicians having fun and covering their influences to a bunch of durr hurr lol random Invader Zim dipshits covering anything they thought was funny.  So who do we get this time around?  The mo'fuckin' Thunder in the East, LOUDNESS!  Yeah, "Crazy Nights" is a kind of silly song, but it's silly in how over the top cheesy it is, as opposed to silly in the sense of METAL BAND COVERING POP SONGS?!  OH PSHAW!  They're tackling metal again, and it's awesome.

That melodic death/power metal hybrid I've been missing so much is back in full force, and Bodom fans around the world should rejoice, for the band has finally pulled their collective heads out of each other's collective asses.  This still have a focus on heaviness in parts, as opposed to the "really fast Nightwish songs with ridiculous screechy vocals" of the first two/three albums, so if you didn't like Hate Crew Deathroll, then chances are you won't like Halo of Blood either.  But let me tell you, I (and thousands of other fans) would much rather have a Hate Crew 2: Electric Boogaloo than Blooddrunk 2: Drunk Harder.  Comeback of the year for me, hands down.


RATING - 81%

Megadeth - Super Collider

I'll be that guy: MORE LIKE POOPER COLLIDER! LOL!

Usually when I talk about Megadave, I typically talk about how they're Metallica Jr, how bewilderingly overrated Endgame is, how damn close to perfect Rust in Peace is, things of that sort.  I have the same few sticking points that I seem to harp on whenever the band is brought up, it's a definite flaw that I certainly acknowledge.  So what am I going to harp on today?  Why, how clear it is that Dave Mustaine has lost his goddamn mind, of course.

The series of events leading up to this has been nothing short of a surreal, yet hysterically apt look into the mind of Dave Mustaine.  We all know about how strong his political beliefs are and how staunchly libertarian he is, but that's not what makes him crazy.  There are plenty of normally well adjusted people who believe in their political leanings so strongly that they're willing to say crazy shit to make a point.  I mean, I don't doubt that Dave probably believes that Obama harnessed the power of the Weather Machine from Red Alert 2 to stage the recent tornadoes in Oklahoma, but that doesn't necessarily make him a bad guitarist or songwriter.  No no no, shit like "Super Collider" makes him a bad songwriter.  Yeah, the title track here was released about a month or so ago, and everybody who heard it promptly shit their pants in awe of how transcendentally crappy it was.  A riffless mid-90s radio rock song with tired melodies and the worst vocal performance of Dave's entire career?  Oh yeah, you bet your sweet little tushie this is going to be a comical trainwreck!  I couldn't wait simply for the sheer schadenfreude.  And before then, Dave announced that David Draiman, the hilariously wimpy frontman of Disturbed, was going to be featured and also help co-write a couple tracks.  Fans lost their shit over this prospect.  I'll admit Disturbed released two alright modern hard rock albums back with Believe and Ten Thousand Fists, but they're largely uninspiring and Draiman himself is a hilarious wussburger of a human being.  The cover art was incredibly funny to me as well, it's one of the most well known stock photos of the Large Hadron Collider with just an added lens flare and a Megadeth logo slapped on to it.  It's so preposterously lazy, they may as well have just released this instead:

ON THE THIIIIGH ROAD!

The day finally came where the album was made available to those of us who are leeches upon the underbelly of the music business, and well... it's bad, but it's not hilarious like I was hoping.  I made the choice to avoid Thirteen (pHU(|< 7|-|@ $7UP1D L337 $P34|< p0PP'/(0(|<) based on how little I've liked practically anything the band has done since 1994, but from what I've gathered, Super Collider isn't all that different.  It plays like a collection of b-sides from the mid 90s for the most part, with boring hard rock songs and boring kinda-vaguely-thrashy songs that they've been shilling since The System has Failed.  It's more just really boring and uninteresting as opposed to outright offensively bad. I mean, there are some decent things here; I think "Kingmaker" is cool hearkening back to the sound of Countdown to Extinction (which I have now dubbed "speed rock"), and "Built for War" goes along those same lines.  And no matter how bitter I am about Broderick potentially damning Nevermore to jump ship for the sinking S.S. Megadeth, there's no denying that he and Mustaine play off each other extremely well, and the leadwork has been pretty consistently great ever since he joined the fold.  But apart from the leadwork, there isn't really any consistent positive from beginning to end on Super Collider.  It pretty solidly flip flops between bad and boring with a few bright spots here and there.

To get the positives out of the way first, the aforementioned appearance of David Draiman is actually probably the best moment of the album.  Say what you will about his voice or the insane Alex Jonesian lyrics he's forced to sing (the word "Al-CIA-da" is seriously used (ya rly)), but at least he sounds youthful and energetic.  Mustaine's already technically awful singing voice has been long shot, and so he just kind of grumbles and snarls his way through the entire album like a tired old man trying to still sound as vicious as he did when he was a smack addicted young adult.  The music does occasionally ramp up the aggression, but the vocals just have no chance of matching up to the energy and pace when it does pick up.  And as I've previously mentioned, the speed rock numbers like "Kingmaker", pieces of "Don't Turn Your Back" and the end of "Dance in the Rain" are pretty good (especially that last song, the double bass passages and Draiman's exuberant performance are the clear highlight of the album for me), and the more mid paced stuff can sometimes groove along pretty well at times.  The horridly titled "Burn!" is a pretty good example of such, even if the song is utterly forgettable if not for the dumb chorus.

But really, that's really all the album has going for it.  Consistently impressive guitar solos over the top of mostly boring speed rock and intended radio singles with the occasional bright spot and vaguely thrashy moment.  Nobody really expects Megadeth to churn out dozens of classic songs and riffs like they used to, but I don't think we fans are asking too much to ask for a little bit more effort on their part.  The title track is still worth all the hate it received upon release, with it's utterly boring progression, pointless lyrics, and hideous vocals.  We know that Megadeth can pull off this style relatively well, Youthanasia was full of decent songs like this, and I maintain that "Countdown to Extinction" is one of the better kinda-ballads in the band's repertoire, but "Super Collider" here is an exercise in half hearted ideas being shat forth with no passion from their creator.  The song just kind of stumbles around on a really bland vocal melody and a complete dearth of anything resembling a real riff.  Granted, it's clearly not meant to be a riff based song, but when the vocals are so hilariously botched and the melodies so uninteresting, something like an interesting riff in the bridge or something would have been most welcome. 

And... good God this man's lyrics just need to be addressed.  We all know they suck, we all know that his increasingly extreme political views have been seeping into his music for a while now, but they manage to be both funny and confusing on Super Collider.  Take "Beginning of Sorrow" (which, to my dismay, is not actually a Suffocation cover) for example, which at first seems like a pretty straightforward take on the hot-button issue of abortion.  But as the song goes on, the narrative just gets super fucking bizarre.  A quick summation is this: "Teenage girl meets 'Mr. Right', Mr. Right turns out to be a jackwagon and rapes her, she is given the choice to abort, chooses not to, spits out baby in an alleyway, kid grows up in shitty foster homes, grows up twisted and bitter, becomes rapist himself, the end".  So wait, what the fuck am I supposed to glean from that?  Abortion should be legal because... otherwise there'd be more rapists in the world?  Or... is it trying to make a statement about the fucked up state of foster care?  Or... rape... is bad?  I just don't get it.  And then one song I keep mentioning as being one of the better ones, "Dance in the Rain", starts off with a goddamn "God Alone" dissonant banging while Dave rambles some spoken word crap about how da gubbermint has your car bugged and how they're just the worst thing ever and anarchy and antichrist and whatever I'm not The Sex Pistols I'm not very good at this get off my back!  And then we have a personal favorite of mine, "Don't Turn Your Back".  Favorite why?  Because I'm almost sure this is yet another Chris Poland diss track.  Motherfucker you wrote this already twenty five years ago.  I'm not even kidding, the lyrics even directly reference getting his stuff stolen.  Goddammit Dave, stop being such a booger.

Despite being boring on the whole, there are some strange musical choices here as well.  The aforementioned awkward spoken word intro of "Dance in the Rain" is a big one, along with the banjo rendition of the opening of "My Last Words" (srsly) in "The Blackest Crow".  Most impressively though, is "Forget to Remember".  Honestly, this one is actually probably my favorite because it just so perfectly encapsulates the ever dwindling coherence of our glorious leader here.  First off, it seems like a fairly typical farewell song.  Could be a breakup, could be a death, whatever, it's a sad song, that's the point.  That is until we reach the bridge, where (and I'm so happy that what I'm about to describe is a real thing) we get a spoken word section where a groveling Dave Mustaine begs to some woman to just please let him talk to her while she tells him to piss off because she has no idea who he is.  The female voice in this exchange is played by his fifteen year old daughter.  And then there's one last verse about how vaccines are evil shoehorned into the end because why the fuck not?  What is going on in this man's head?  I implore you, make sense of this insanity.  Albums like City or Obscura sound like the musical manifestation of insanity to you?  Well you simply just haven't spent enough time with Super Collider.  Between the not-bad-but-kinda-half-hearted speed rock and the really terrible radio half-ballads, the layers peel away to reveal a man who hasn't been in full control of his brain ever since he learned how to burn the bottom half of a spoon.  And it's odd because he still manages to surround himself with great musicians, and Broderick here is no exception, and he still manages to shine through when given the opportunity.

But clearly, this is very much a "Dave" project, and the band really has been ever since day one.  This used to work out fine when other guitarists were able to inject their style into the still great songs Dave was writing.  But now that he's an old, decrepit, lip-flapping lunatic, somebody needs to pull the reins and sit the man down, shake him violently and just yell in his face "NOBODY WANTS THREE RADIO ROCK SONGS ABOUT THE BARACKALYPSE.  Goddammit man, we get it, you don't trust the government and personal freedom is being eradicated yak yak yak.  Lots of people agree with you, but you are fucking awful at making this point eloquently.  You're not a very good lyricist, you just kind of hamfist stupid scaremongering buzzwords into an awkward cadence and then run with it without editing your work at all.  Nobody wants this shit.  You know what they do want?  Fast, violent, ripping music with lyrics that have fuck all to do with your increasingly pushy political views.  Look back at 'This Day We Fight', that song was so goddamn good that most people seem to forget that the rest of Endgame sucks.  Just... do that again.  We know you can do it, you just did it flawlessly nary two albums ago.  Why instead do you churn out crap like 'Off the Edge' and 'Forget to Remember'?  Take your pills, man.  Pick up the pace, let Shawn double bass and let Chris shred even more, maybe even give him an opportunity to start writing some riffs.  The pieces are in place, but we have a raving madman at the helm who can't focus or make a good decision anymore.  Get your head in the game, dammit."

That's all there really is to say about Super Collider.  It's boring more than it is outright bad, but even with that being true, it still manages to make some bafflingly strange decisions.  Is it worth checking out?  Ehh, not really.  "Kingmaker" is okay and the second half of "Dance in the Rain" is really good, but otherwise it's one of those things you shouldn't go out of your way for.  Not the trainwreck we were all expecting (un)fortunately, but it's still boring and yet another pointless addition to the ever growing pile of pointless Megadeth albums since Youthanasia.  The band's biggest problem is pretty solidly the band's own leader, and it's sad to say (especially since Rust in Peace is one of my all time favorites), but it's best to just ignore Megadeth at this point.


RATING - 30%

PS - The Thin Lizzy cover is pretty solid too, though they don't do anything special with it.

Goatwhore - Carving Out the Eyes of God

The album that killed Goatwhore

I'm saying that from the perspective of somebody who feels that this is far and away their strongest album.  And even then, that's slightly facetious because it's really only one song that killed this band, and that is "Apocalypic Havoc".  That opening track is everything the band had been building towards with their previous efforts, it's the fastest, thrashiest, catchiest, and most energetic track they'd written up to this point, and has quickly become a fan favorite and live staple (as it rightfully should be).  Goatwhore's riffing had always been razor sharp, but "Apocalyptic Havoc" just turns it up to an even higher level of intensity and precision.  Every riff is hard hitting, and are among the purest thrash in their repertoire, with minimal dilutions of black or death metal (unlike the rest of their work, which balances the three pretty well), with a pummeling drum performance, and a frenzied vocal performance.  It's impossible not to sing along, and it's far and away the band's best song.

WHO NEEDS A GOD WHEN YOU'VE GOT SATAN?!

But therein lies the precise problem with Carving Out the Eyes of God, "Apocalyptic Havoc" is such a stunningly good song, that it really hammers home how mediocre the rest of the record, and hell, even the band's career as a whole, really is.  Seriously, one of Goatwhore's biggest strengths has always been how consistent their quality has remained across and within albums, I'd go as far as to say that's what their entire legacy is based off of (I'm gonna pretend that nobody noticed/cared that they featured members of Acid Bath, Soilent Green, and Crowbar).  I could never find fault in the band's unwavering standard of quality, as each song on each album stood as a punishingly heavy, yet at the same time infectiously catchy monument to how to properly earn semi-mainstream recognition while keeping your integrity as an extreme metal band.  Goatwhore seemingly had it figured out.

And then they wrote "Apocalyptic Havoc".

Kids, this is why you should never try your hardest, because when you get it right, jerks like me are going to expect you to get it right every time after that.  The rest of this album just totally pales in comparison to the opening track, and it's not for any reason other than the songwriting is just not as stellar.  The riffs are always sharp, the vocals are always harsh and the pace is always blistering.  It's just... never as good as "Apocalyptic Havoc" again.  It all sounds like the same song after that, it's like they put all of their effort into that one track and then just kind of coasted through the remaining nine.  Honestly, they've kind of always been like this, but it was just never this blatant.  I mean, go back to the previous album, A Haunting Curse.  The best songs are also the two singles ("Alchemy of the Black Sun Cult" and "Forever Consumed Oblivion") and the rest are pretty consistently okay.  They've always been pretty one dimensional about blasting a very straightforward black/death/thrash hybrid at the listener with the occasional punky/rock'n'roll element, and that's pretty much the whole of what Goatwhore has presented from day one.  They're a balanced mixture of nearly every extreme metal genre and they've always been pretty good at it.  It wasn't until "Apocalyptic Havoc" though, that I realized how stellar they actually weren't.

There are pretty much no standouts on Carving Out the Eyes of God past that opening scorcher.  I guess "To Mourn and Forever Wander Through Forgotten Doorways" is memorable for being the first to really bring the tempo down at all, and I think "Razor Flesh Devoured" is the only other track really worth listening to thanks to it's heightened black metal influence helping it rise above the mediocrity otherwise, but apart from those last two tracks, it's just a mire of boredom and "been there, done that".  Goatwhore hasn't had a new idea since they started, but they'd always made up for it with enthusiasm.  That is quite unfortunate because there's only so far that can carry you, and the exact amount is "about fifteen seconds after writing 'Apocalyptic Havoc'".  I'm sorry to keep harping on that, but it really is the main downfall of the album.  We've seen how brilliant they can be, and they just never put the pieces together in the correct way again.  Every other track blends all of the aforementioned elements together just the same way they always have, but they all come off as very tired and bland and effortless.  There isn't one memorable moment past the first three and a half minutes of the album.

I'm just repeating myself over and over again, so I guess I'll have to keep this one short.  The point is that I haven't namedropped the same song in every paragraph on accident, it really is far and away the best song the band ever did, and one of the most perfect modern metal songs you'll ever find.  The problem is that they never again live up to the standards set by that one particular song despite everything else containing the same elements.  The songwriting was never again that on-point, and the one-dimensional nature of the songs really bogs everything down after the first two or three.  It's not bad I guess, but it's not really worth listening to over most other things you could probably be listening to.

NO GOD TO OFFER THIS FORGIVENESS

RATING - 39%

Grand Mood - Final Urge to March

Overwhelming ambivalence

And The Great Taste Swap Challenge continues forth, as this time I eschew the silly doom of Metantoine, and instead have turned to the Phil Lynott-esque MutantClannfear for my next challenge.  Being familiar with his taste, prepared for this in advance.  I spent weeks going back and listening to all the slam I've known and reviewed throughout the years.  Embryonic Depravity, Amputated, Human Mastication, Gorevent, things of that sort, preparing myself for what kind of brainless ballyhoo he would chuck at me.  I preempted the assault with the most saccharine flower metal I could think of, and in return he rewards my arduous preparation with... ludicrously obscure black metal.  Who'd'a thunk?

Really, Grand Mood embodies the attitude I despise within certain black metal circles.  No information available anywhere about the band apart from their name and their demo, and that's about the long and short of it.  This intentional obscurity always buggered me senseless, it's like a bunch of kids meeting in a clubhouse with a NO GIRLS ALLOWED sign outside who spend all day high fiving each other because those dumb, silly girls don't know what they're missing in this clubhouse.  I get the point of it, I really do, I just think it's fucking stupid and more often than not takes precedence over actually writing engaging music.

Grand Mood's band picture on MA shows five figures, but I'm more apt to believe that it's made by one scrawny kid from the middle of Buttdick, South Dakota, but that isn't really the point.  There's no way it took five people to put their heads together and come up with such fairly typical raw BM.  I mean let's face it, it's a pretty bad sign when I almost never listen to the style of music you play, and yet I still feel like I've heard your songs dozens of times before.  That's not to say that music needs to be oozing with creativity to be enjoyable (I listen to bands like Wisdom and Bywar for God's sake, I'm not that much of a hypocrite), and Grand Mood does a fine job of doing nothing new while still doing it pretty well.  But really, run through the black metal checklist and you'll end up with precisely zero blank boxes.  Extremely lo-fi production?  Yup.  Tremolo riffs?  Check.  Vocals either way too upfront or buried in the background?  Background here.  Blast beats for fast parts and vaguely punkish and/or marching beats for the mid paced parts?  Yuperooni.  Final Urge to March just kind of strikes me as baby's first raw black metal, and to its credit, it doesn't seem to pull any punches and try to be anything other than that musically.

Taking out the strange choice to include two versions of every track (three normal, three instrumental), this is a very short demo, consisting almost entirely of all the cliche's I mentioned earlier.  Right from the get go, you're bombarded with extremely lo-fi tremolo riffs and a mid paced snare march.  I give "Final Urge to March" and "Iron Cornucopia" a little more credit for trying to work some intrinsic melody into the riffs, and they do a fine job, if nothing mindblowing.  But with that said, my favorite track is actually "Walking Through Wind", perhaps because it's the most "normal" track to be found.  It's pretty much just straight howling and blast beats and I like that.  The other two tracks are a bit more ambitious with tempo changes and melody but I feel like it all comes together the best when they strip it down to the essentials and just go for straightforward dissonance and misanthropy.  In the end though there really isn't a whole lot to say about the songs themselves due to the one-dimensional nature of them.  Is there an atmosphere?  I dunno, doesn't feel like it.  Is it bad?  No, it's perfectly capable for what the style is and there's nothing that stands out in either direction for me.  I mean, I can guarantee you I'll never listen to this again once I press that handy-dandy "publish" button, but if somebody is looking for recs along this line (and for some reason ask me), I can certainly feel confident in pointing them towards Grand Mood.  To me, it feels pretty shallow, and after a dozen and a half listens, I don't feel any different about the demo than when I first heard it.  So if there are layers to be peeled away, it's just not happening for me.  Sorry y'all.

MutantClannfear doesn't have his own personal blog, but his reviews can be found here, and you should read them. Asshole.

RATING - 60%

JERKING THE CIRCLE Vol III: Gorguts - Obscura

 I feel like I'm taking crazy pills...

For real, Obscura is the album that inspired this entire series in the first place.  The reason for this is simple; as far as I've been able to tell, there is no other album in all of heavy metal that is both as well loved by the fandom and also as intensely reviled by me.  I can understand near-universal worship of bands and albums I dislike most of the time, I really can.  Hell, I rag on Helloween's most notable work all the time, but I know why people like it.  I understand how and why it was so influential, even to bands that I enjoy.  I get it, I really do.  But for the life of me, Obscura still eludes me.  What the fuck is it that makes this so goddamn revered?  I really can't wrap my head around it.  The only way I can rationalize it is by viewing it from the "I love weird things for the sake of weird things" crowd, but even then I still see this hailed by both old school death metal fanatics and snobby prog fans alike.  Something about Gorguts's third album brings everybody together, and I'm not even exaggerating when I say I've spent roughly eight years listening to this album on and off trying to make sense of it all, and I just cannot for the life of me understand the appeal in this sonic trainwreck. 

Some people are just suckers for dissonance, I can get that, it's why shit like Portal and Ulcerate are so popular in the underground.  Hell, I'm a huge fan of SikTh and they're pretty notorious for sounding terrible on purpose since the guitarists don't know a lick of music theory and just kind of play whatever.  But Gorguts here manages to be dissonant 100% of the time, there isn't one consonant chord or melody throughout the entire bloated runtime of Obscura.  I'm as serious as a goddamned heart attack right now, for real.  This manages to run over an hour without anything pleasing to the ear happening.

But BH!  It's death metal!  You can't expect death metal to be pleasing to the ear!  I bet you're an In Flames fan!

Clearly I mean pleasing in a death metal sense.  I like listening to Cannibal Corpse, I enjoy rocking out to Immolation, I could spin the first Krisiun album day and night, I have honestly nearly shat my pants during "Suspended in Tribulation" during a Suffocation show, I enjoy all of these classic bands not because they're melodic or pleasant, but because they don't sound like they just picked up their instruments for the first time the day prior to entering the studio.  I don't give a fuck how "creative" or "avant garde" or "outside the box" this album is, the bottom line is that the opening riff to the title track sounds fucking terrible.  That's not even first year guitar player level of skill, that's not even first day.  That is somebody picking up their buddy's guitar when he leaves the room for a second and just wailing away on it without having a clue what he's doing.  Every last riff sounds like this, they all sound like dissonant smashing and random bends with no real thought put behind them other than "Does this sound like shit?  Yeah?  Perfect!".  The percussion section is equally nonsensical; complementing nothing by blasting at seemingly inopportune times, goofing around with bizarre jazz sensibilites, and just seemingly playing the entire album as a free time jazz exercise as opposed to anything even remotely structured.

And you know what?  Maybe that's the real problem I have with the album.  Maybe it's my distaste of intentionally structureless jazz that draws me away from it.  Let me ponder that for a bit...

Oh, no wait, my mistake, that's absolute bullshit.  It's not just the fact that the structure is bizarre or jazzy, it's that it isn't there at all, and as a result nothing sticks with you other than "Clouded", and that's solely because it stands out for being much slower than the rest of the album and a whopping ten goddamn minutes long.  The songs all waft in and out of consciousness between epileptic fits of chaotic nonsense, noodling around with strange, dissonant wonkiness and grating harmonics for the better part of an hour, boring itself into your skull like an iron mosquito (note to self: pitch Iron Mosquito to Capcom for new Mega Man X game).  Other than that one track, nothing else is memorable for any reason other than the fact that it sounds like a chalkboard grinding its teeth.  This is seriously the most irritating music I've ever listened to, and this is taking into account shit like Neoandertals, Enmity, and that one random Buckethead impression that my buddy recorded that I post all the time.  I listen to albums while I review them, and this has taken me a month to write this far simply because Obscura gives me such a cataclysmic headache.  I know that saying any particular piece of music is "random" or "has no structure at all" and things of that sort almost always implies that the reviewer doesn't know what he/she's talking about and just can't fathom something unconventional, and I know how silly I must sound saying those same things about this album.  Obviously it isn't random, Gorguts can perform these songs live, they were very deliberately written, but they suuuuuuuck.

Another thing I really need to get across is Luc Lemay's vocals.  They are just... oh man, otherworldly bad.  Strangely enough, on one hand, I feel like they fit the music perfectly, as they're really tortured and chaotic sounding, like there's absolutely no skill as a death metal vocalist present and he's just yelling at the top of his lungs.  I'm not just saying that because I feel like there's zero skill involved in the instrumentals either (though that does also apply), but I feel like this style could work if the music was better, because it fits with the chaotic dissonance that the music revels in.  Agonized howling like this works well with certain torture doom bands like Senthil who go for a similar atmosphere, but with an album so chock full of irritation like this, it's merely another pin in my back.  It's all so non-stop and abrasive, and it works in all the wrong ways.  He howls like a guy making fun of death metal, and the guitars just hammer away and impossibly dissonant and wretched sounding chords and seemingly randomly placed harmonic squeals, and the drums sound like they're being performed by an eight year old who is just having the time of his life hitting everything he can.  This is a death metal version of The Shaggs, it sounds like a parody, and I will never understand how it attained such cult status for its "avant garde genius".

Honestly, Obscura will forever blow my mind.  This must be how death metal sounds to people who hate death metal.  And hell, even if I look at it from a different perspective, it doesn't help it.  Let's not view it as death metal, but instead prog metal or avant garde, either way it sounds like crap.  The music sounds bad, the guitars sound like a first grader just strumming and sliding his fingers up and down the neck, and the vocals are almost hilariously inept.  This bewilders me because I've actually since gone back and listened to some of the band's older material (which I'd avoided for years because this album pisses me off so much), and they're a perfectly capable band.  It's not like they're a bunch of Wesley Willis types that people latch on to for novelty (or just because they're so passionate about what they do that it's hard not to like), nor are they something like the aforementioned Shaggs or Complete where they are so transcendentally inept that they get dug up years later and passed around the internet for shiggles.  They wrote some solid death metal back in the day, and then around 1998 apparently decided to go a different direction.  That direction was downwards. 

Part of me can almost appreciate what Gorguts is going for here, I can tell they're trying to do something very different, they're trying to be much more dissonant than anything before them.  They're going for some kind of weird, avant garde style insanity.  Hell, maybe they're trying to tap into the musical representation of insanity itself.  It's possible, but it doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day, the product presented to us sounds like absolute horsedick.  There is not one single aspect of Obscura that I can give praise to.  It's a haphazard mess of seemingly intentionally irritating parts thrown together with apparently no regard for the interconnecting parts nor the big picture.  The high pitched slides and squeals contrast with the dissonant banging in the same way a knifewound to the gut contrasts with a hatchet to the cranium.  The vocals are one dimensional yowls and shrieks and simply add another layer of needless frustration onto an already compounded pile of headache fuel.  How this ever became a cult classic is beyond me, because it sound like if I had just picked up instruments I'd never played before and wailed on them without any real idea how they worked.  And it's weird because it's deliberate.  It sounds like cacophonous shit on purpose, and that somehow makes it a brilliant masterpiece.

I didn't expect to give this a zero when I started writing, I really didn't.  I expected a single digit score, yes, but not a zero.  The more I listened, the worse it got.  It just gets more irritating with repeated listens, and the layers peel away not to reveal hidden genius, but simply different frequencies of irritation I hadn't noticed before.  There's nothing here to like, this is the absolute nadir of musicality.  I don't care how expertly this was written, I don't care how deliberate and complex it is.  Frankly, it sounds awful, goes on for far too long, and has nothing enjoyable to be found.  You want weird, late 90s death metal?  Listen to Starseed, otherwise hop off this album's dick and stop trying to find beauty inside the asshole of Shub Niggurath.


RATING - 0%

JERKING THE CIRCLE Vol II: Death - Individual Thought Patterns

Crushed under its own weight

What time is it?!  Time for another installment of Jerking the Circle!  Yes kids, the series wherein I take a look at albums that get tons and tons of praise from certain groups within the metal community (or just the community at large).  Today we look at a band that released some stunningly great albums, and instead focus on what is by far their worst one.  Goddammit Chuck, remove your head from your anus, por favor.

Death had a moderately lengthy and quite illustrious career, spanning seven albums of wildly varying sounds and an even more unpredictable lineup.  And this, Individual Thought Patterns marks both their lowest point as a band, and also (bafflingly) their most star studded lineup.  Death has always basically been Chuck Schuldiner's Revolving Band Selected Via Musical Chairs Matches, and in 1993 he managed to strike potential gold by retaining the fretless hobo of Sadus fame, Steve DiGiorgio, and bailing on the technically proficient but writing impaired hacks from Cynic and replaced them with goddamn Andy LaRocque (known for King Diamond), and motherfucking Gene Hoglan (known for every fucking band ever).  Seriously, you ever play that game where you daydream up the ultimate band?  Chuck Schuldiner fucking did that, and whatever personality issues the man had that caused members to leave constantly/him to constantly kick them out, I really wished he would have found a way to rein it in around this era, because there is so much star power potential in here I could go blind by looking at it.

And then I actually heard the album.

Yeah, I guess stars are prone to supernovas, because this is an unmitigated disaster.  Don't get me wrong, despite my general distaste for prog, I don't dislike the fact that Chuck decided to take the band in a more progressive direction (they were pretty much devoid of death metal from this point onwards).  Hell Symbolic is probably my favorite album by the band, just a smidgeon above Leprosy.  But this here is a goddamn trainwreck.  This is what happens when somebody who's good at being hard and fast and heavy decides that that path is too stupid and instead tries to be more intellectual about everything.  And hey, to his credit, he did eventually figure it out, because Symbolic is great, but Chuck didn't have a goddamn idea what he was doing when writing this album.  Listening to this in one sitting, I'd be hard pressed to tell you where each song ends and a new one begins, much less which song is even actually playing, even after a decade of being a Death fan. 

There are moments of brilliance scattered throughout, as "Destiny" has a fantastic riff hidden somewhere in the middle, as does "Nothing is Everything" and "Overactive Imagination", but that's really all I can do for critique; pick out random bits from random songs and tell you whether it's good or bad.  It's woefully unprofessional, and I get that, but it really feels like the album was written and recorded in that same haphazard direction.  Lots of shit happens, but I don't think anybody other than Chuck himself actually knew why.  This is probably the most literal collection of riffs and ideas I've ever heard.  Very few sections repeat later in a song, it's basically just a 40 minute gag reel of jazzy proto-tech-prog ideas that the band was noodling around with but couldn't really decide on how to arrange.  So they just decided to play them all in one long 40 minute take, arbitrarily consider it a new track every four minutes or so, and call it a day.  It's a shame because the talent is obviously there, but at this point Chuck was no longer in a transition phase, and therefore had neither that excuse nor the leftover bits of pummeling death metal morbidity that he had on Human.  Individual Thought Patterns is instead it's own entity with no crutch to lean on, which is unfortunate because it's rather malformed and disabled.

There was also a quite bizarre malady that plagued the band during this middle era as well, and that was that the more technical, proggy, and wanky the music got, the shorter the average song was.  The average song lengths on both Human and Individual Thought Patterns are shorter than their more simplistic predecessors in Leprosy and Spiritual Healing.  This kind of writing (when not done in such a slapdash and poorly arranged manner) definitely lends itself to a more spaced out format.  I normally prefer shorter songs, mind you (one of the reasons Gama Bomb will always be better than Cyclone Temple), but nothing here has room to breathe or develop.  Instead we're presented with ten claustrophobic and rushed exercises in vaguely deathy progjazz.  Again, the entire album is presented as a collection of unrelated things, and that's basically the end of it right there where it starts.

The production job is also a nagging whack in the shins, as like with the previous album, it's rather thin and lacks the punch of their earlier recordings.  We've all heard Leprosy, we understand how good they can sound.  The guitar tone on that album was as thick as a baby's arm, and yet here it's this wispy gossamer.  I realize they were going for more precision and less chunk, but the music is noticeably less powerful this time around and it suffers for it.  The widdly wanky parts are well suited to this kind of sound, I'll admit, but there are occasions when real riffs and double bass and whatnot actually do happen, and they end up laughably weak in the grand scheme of things.  "Weak" is an adjective that applies only to this album throughout all of Death's discography, and that's a giant mark against it.

Overall this is too jazzy and not thought out enough for it's own good.  There are far too many segments where the instruments all just kind of break down into their own thing and all wander away from each other.  The percussion is definitely prone to this, with Hoglan being wildly misused and left to just mostly fuck around with bizarre cymbal patterns.  When Chuck reined it in on the following two albums and focused more on cohesive songwriting and logical progression, they knocked it out of the park.  But here?  Not at all, not yet.  The kinda awkward but still good transition phase in Human had long passed, and they were fully into the prog territory at this point, but frankly, the songwriter here still wasn't entirely sure of himself, and as a result Individual Thought Patterns is a complete mess, and probably the only skippable album in Death's entire career.

RATING - 38%

Witch Mountain - Cauldron of the Wild

And then that little girl shocks The Rock

So earlier this week, I proposed a challenge to the lovable grizzly, Metantoine.  The deal came down to us both agreeing to step out of our comfort zones and review each other's preferred genres.  He stepped up to the plate and tackled Blood Dress's album, and since he held up his end of the bargain by reviewing a tech death album, I must defend my honor and review a mum doom album.  I figured I'd take on one that seems to get near-universal praise amongst a good chunk of the metal fandom, Witch Mountain's Cauldron of the Wild.

Final thought?  Eh, it's alright.

I feel like I should like this a lot more than I actually do, because despite not really being a doom fan, there is definitely a lot to like here.  Honestly, I feel like the main thing holding this back is one of the main reasons a lot of people really like the band in the first place, and that is the vocal performance of Uta Plotkin.  Now don't get me wrong, she is a very talented singer, and the actual sound of her voice is gorgeous, and she hits high notes with chutzpah.  Hell, even her lyrics are very good.  So what is there to complain about?  Really, I just don't think her voice gels with the music very well a lot of the time.  She seems like she's hitting notes too high for the music most of the time.  With guitars as deep and heavy as these, her voice should be a sweet contrast, but it just ends up distracting most of the time.  It's like they're singing in a different key.  It's hard to explain, but they just sound off most of the time.  Perhaps it's just a personal quibble, and most people will think I'm just hearing improperly because my head is planted so firmly up inside my own butthole, but it's really distracting to me and it knocks the album down a few pegs.

Vocals aside, Cauldron of the Wild is a resoundingly heavy album, full of suffocating atmosphere and slow, churning riffwork.  I realize "churning" is a really cliche word used to describe any riff that sounds even the slightest bit dark, but I feel like this is one of the better examples of such an adjective.  The extraordinarily slow riffs conjure up imagery of an old witch, glaring intently into a cauldron as she carefully and deliberately stirs the pot of odoriferous muck.  This is an album I "feel" more than I "listen to" in the sense that my preferred genres are typically very energetic and high tempo, so giving my full attention to something with the opposite endgame in mind leads to me taking on a very different perspective.  I feel like I'm lost in the woods while this is on, calm yet unsure.  None of the riffs sound urgent, but they all sound very deliberate, like they were crafted specifically to sound like you're being stalked.  It's a very dark and organic album, and I like that.

The atmosphere is fantastic, so it's a shame that the riffs are so inconsequential.  I mean, I understand this isn't really a riff based sound they're going for here, but still, there's almost nothing to grab you musically.  Cauldron of the Wild was definitely written with vocals and atmosphere in mind, and in that regard it succeeds.  But the greatest albums can strike a balance between the two ideals of atmosphere and engaging music (Don't Break the Oath, In Somniphobia, Sin After Sin, et cetera), whereas this here has pretty uninteresting music, accompanied by soaringly clean vocals and a great mood. "The Ballad of Lanky Rae" is probably the worst offender here, as the riffs there just kind of plod around and don't really go anywhere, whereas "Beekeeper" and "Shelter" (far and away the best songs) at least have a direction they're moving towards.  The vocals also seem to mesh the best on those two tracks, with their melodies being very striking and the lyrics very memorable.  "Shelter" in particular has a wonderfully powerful climax.  The two very long songs don't do a whole lot for me either, they just kind of go through the motions with nothing exciting happening in them.

And I realize I may just be the wrong demographic for this, but it seems like a lot of times the riffs are utterly inconsequential and don't have a lot going on behind them.  It's very slow, it's very deliberate, and while they create a great backdrop for the ballsy croon of Plotkin, they never do anything themselves that make me perk up and take notice.  I love the general feel of the album, but I find the music lacking, and I think the vocals are fantastic, but rarely fit with the music.  Basically the music itself needs some sort of overhaul for this to reach its full potential for me.  The good bits are good enough for me to give this a positive overall score, but the rest of the band really needs to catch up with the vocals.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled tech death and europower reviews!


RATING - 65%

Check out Metantoine's site! He may speak a funny, dead language and like a terrible hockey team, but he's a great writer in spite of that.