Rotten Tomatoes is rotten. It's slow and ad-ridden, it's colored after pus and infections, it has a database as tiny as the amount of fucks I give about how illegible my handwriting is, and its policy of basing scores on a number of “yays” and “nays” results in your total knowledge of the movie remaining the same. When I accidentally stumble into this horrid realm, I wonder what my life has come to. Not that it's all that bad, but when you're waiting weeks for a worthless page to load, it seems miserable. This waiting and disappointment have, though, the positive effect of giving way to introspection. You wonder about things, and you occasionally reach great conclusions. In this case, I wondered about the reason for this benign tumor, this negligible blood clot, to exist in the first place, and what I realized was this: it is a template. A template for programmers and web designers of exactly what they don't want their movie review website to become. A place to check on all the potential errors one might end up committing, reference on what to stray away from. This way, the only thing one needs to do to ensure the hypothetical website's success is to avoid making it resemble Rotten Tomatoes.
Now, let's return to one of the points mentioned earlier, the “yay” or “nay” system. The “x out of y (x <= y)” system is not much better. Even “yays and nays” can be interpreted as “x out of 1”. What happens is that even if the knowledge of how good the rated entity is becomes more exact depending on the value of y, the knowledge you gathered will still amount to only that, how good the rated entity is. You don't end up knowing how valuable it is as an existing fraction of the total knowledge and culture created up to that point in time, for instance. And there ought to be a rating for that, because it is not a direct correlation. So, for example, Rotten Tomatoes is horrible in terms of quality, but extremely important from a didactic perspective. As such, I think it was very brave of Criterion to make a Death Metal reinterpretation of Rotten Tomatoes.
No, really, The Dominant makes Criterion sound like they're so aware of all the things that one is not supposed to do when making a good DM album that they just do every one of them out of boredom. They clearly strive for the “once great band trying to return to its glory days after a second reunion tour” sound. And despite this being a debut, this sound is so convincingly executed that you can almost see the band members crying themselves to sleep after screaming “It all made sense before!” at the top of their lungs for half an hour. Their work here is so generic that it has to have been done so intentionally. The album cover is lazy, the logo looks like it's been used so many times before that it's now completely devoid of meaning, what can be discerned from the lyrics is not worth discerning, and the song titles sound like band names (most probably because they are). As for the music, well, let me change the paragraph.
Have you ever heard an album where the production was absolutely bland and uninteresting, but simultaneously sounded somehow off? And have you ever heard an album where, encased in that frustrating dullness are riffs that have a spark of potential, muddled by said production? And have you ever heard an album where said riffs are encased, completely isolated from each other, in medleys that are supposed to pass for songs? I've explained that I believe this release to be comparable to Rotten Tomatoes: it's horrible, but worth the experience. Now, the last point I mentioned is exactly why I think this. The structures of the songs make me believe Criterion either have not listened to Death metal in a long time, or wrote The Dominant with the Wikipedia entry on Death Metal as their main influence. I get the feeling that Criterion don't really understand the concept of a song making sense. At all.
I actually compiled a list of the structures of all the songs, also stating my remarks in relation to said structures, but I really didn't need to do that to notice a pattern in the music here. Criterion seem to love making riffs pop out of nowhere. This technique can be used tastefully, obviously, but what they like to do afterwards is to forget how said riffs were originally meant to be tasteful surprises, and start working on the songs based on these one-time intrusions. They also like making these excellent ultra epic multi-section solos, and then plopping them wherever. There is one for almost every song, generally in the most awkward places. Meanwhile all the other usual structural elements are just scattered around aimlessly, and the listener is left to attempt to make sense of all that mess. The result is five unremarkable tracks and another four tracks competing for the title of “worst Death Metal song ever”.
”Blackened Memories” sounds like it's about to end for practically its entire runtime. “Last Breath” throws in a “climactic conclusion” solo before its first minute and overall sounds like someone accidentally spliced the two halves of the song the wrong way around. “Obliteration” stops making sense just as you realize that the solo is going for too damn long and you're only half way into the 3 minutes and 54 seconds indicated. Even the band eventually gave up on that track and decided to just slap a cheesy sample between the overlong middle and the ending and call it a day. Finally, “Demoniac Replacement” is just an intro, a normal chorus-verse-chorus after a devastating car crash, and the intro's younger sibling getting all solded together in some awkward incident and the three having to live with this predicament somehow.
All this happens while the guitars and drums do their best at repeating stuff that has been done umpteen times before. Occasionally, they'll mistakenly slip an interesting part here and there, and there's even a whole song that can be considered “good”. The vocalist is the best musician in this department. He's boring as hell. Period. He just drones on and off in the foreground. Nothing else. The album flows just like a random compilation of tracks, which are in turn a random compilation of riffs. No sense of order, no sense of progression. If it weren't for the sudden bouts of creativity in terms of riff writing, The Dominant would have been a perfect learning tool. “Wanna make a good Death Metal album? Now it's easy. All you have to do is not sound like us.”, Criterion could say. Still, this release is a fantastic achievement, and I'm surprised it hasn't been made earlier. I recommend people listen to this and endure it, and really try to delve into all its mistakes. Not very enjoyable, but certainly worth your time.
Standout tracks:
The Slayer
Awaken
Suffocation
On another note, I became 18 recently, so I'm officially within the appropriate age for being pretentious. So please allow me to make use of this opportunity to write like a total asshat this once without repercussions.
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