Ancient Necropsy - Sanctuary Beyond The Infinite...

You know what? I've been trying to find a way to start this review in my usual “desperately trying to be funny” style for two weeks now, and I haven't found a single way to do it that would make any sense. I honestly can't find anything to bring up and occupy two paragraphs with. There isn't all that much to make this album stand out. Other people don't appear to like it much, meanwhile I find it excellent. But then I set out to invent combinations of words that would prove Sanctuary Beyond The Infinite... to be worthwhile, and I can't. The truth is that what we have here is an okay release that for some reason is way beyond okay.

You know that first completely obscure band you found on Bandcamp, whose album you listened to once, thought “hey, these guys are really good” and then never listened to ever again? That's exactly what SBTI... resembles. Nondescript album cover, nondescript production and a few ellipses thrown into the track titles for further nondescriptiveness. I especially like the way the instrumental intro, and a good one at that, is called “The Absolute Truth About...”. It gives you a sense of connection between the first track and the second, like if they were the two movements of the musical composition entitled “The Absolute Truth About Limited Golden Keys To The Paradise”. My theories for what that means are that either “Absolute Truth About Ltd.” is a fictional company whose product is a gold plated bong in the shape of a key, or that the lyrics are a PSA about drugs.

Anyway, the most important element in this whole endeavor is the music. It is a concoction that bonds the fast pace and the linear/insane structures of the technical school of brutal death metal with strong sense of progression and riffing that exhibits very melodic tendencies. This sound is good. I like it very much. It is epic. But, to keep with the Bandcamp analogy, that is really all you get from second track to last. No contrasts, no interesting conflicting ideas, only very slight album progression. “The Epitaph Of The Phoenix Arising” lets out a hint at its intentions as a closer, what with having a rather different guitar and drum sound, not to mention a very “final song”-ish section in the middle, but it would have also been perfectly logical if the album were to continue afterwards.

This means that SBTI... relies almost entirely on the strength of the riffs, and that mostly depends on preference. I understand why one wouldn't like what Ivancient is doing regarding the guitar acrobatics on this album: it is kind of generic and pretty simplistic at times, and isn't always that effective. But I am really fond of the riffs, mainly because within the context they give the songs a sense of epicity that is not found in most music. That is also practically the only reason I like this album so much.

I have to remind at this point that we are discussing a sound that is almost guaranteed to fail. You need to have a strong sense of self control and musical maturity to pull it off. Add one detail too many and the whole thing comes crashing down. Don't add enough details, and you succumb into being just another stereotypical Bandcamp act. Just the achievement that is having created  9 songs + 1 of this kind that are neither boring nor terribly jarring justifies giving this one a spin. Let alone the fact that half of these songs are close to perfection, in my opinion. And opinion is really what will make or break this release for a listener. I personally adore it. If you give it a listen and hate it, I perfectly understand.

That is all I had to say. I don't know why I couldn't write it two weeks earlier.

Standout tracks:
Lost At The Eternal Space
Altar Of Fire
Revelations
Sanctuary Beyond The Infinite
Epitaph Of The Phoenix Arising

Ancient Necropsy - Apocalyptic Empire

Imagine that you have a child, and that this child has made a drawing. They hand you their work. You glance at it, mumble a “That's a very nice drawing of a squiggle, child” and doom it to the Fridge Door of Negligence. You choose the magnet with the perfect enormousness to weakness ratio, so as to increase the likelihood that the magnet will fall off, and to ensure that as much of the drawing as possible is not visible while it hasn't. But just as you're about to stick the printer paper onto the door, where it can be forgotten forever, you suddenly notice that the drawing is actually of an artistic quality comparable to the likes of Michelangelo or da Vinci. That's a plausible allegory for the first experience of listening to Apocalyptic Empire.

All the elements appear to indicate your stumbling upon a relentless onslaught of pedestrian brutal death metal that is here to bore you for approximately twice as long as a usual album of the genre. Before anything else, you are indifferently greeted by a cover that is as unimpressive as it's confusing as hell. I wonder where Ivancient, the sole member of this project, got the idea that a castle that is actually a disintegrating space rocket that is actually a volcano would make for good cover art. Then, you are prepared by an introduction that is more reminiscent of the 80s than the 80s themselves. When the actual music starts, you notice that the production makes everything sound either like processed farts or like processed cooking pots, or like a mixture of the two. The music is nothing special at first either. You have two thin guitars that usually play the same lead, backed by a tupperware drumset. And they spend the songs just skimming through sections with no obvious progression, meanwhile the dynamics are entirely up to the listener's imagination.

But as you dig deeper into the album's nature, some order begins to reveal itself. Something that is not too dissimilar from the notion of song structure becomes noticeable and the guitar exercises used instead of riffs morph into actual riffs. The style of riffing used kind of resembles a more BDM version of The Chasm, interspersed with a unique style of going up and down scales really fast, about one experimental moment per 5 minutes, and a few rare tinges of Lykathea Aflame. If songs were people, the structure of the average song from this album would be what you'd get if all humans mysteriously disappeared and aliens tried to reconstitute what a human looked like with only a toothbrush and a sock as reference.

With these elements, Ancient Necropsy has accomplished the feat of making a surprisingly great album. A very rickety balance between memorability and confusion is kept pretty consistently and the gargantuan length of the album actually works in its favor. The subtle contrast between the first half and the second results in a very rewarding experience as well. The first half mostly experiments with virtually unfollowable structures and aims at destroying rewind buttons. Meanwhile the second is far more straightforward and linear, focusing more on quality riffing. When I say subtle, though, I mean very subtle, like the difference between a bald person and a bald person after they got a haircut. The entire album is confusing and convoluted, and the experience is a 35 minute journey through Whatthehellisgoingonville that offers no chance to take a breath. If you want to make sense of the journey, I wish you luck. I took 6 months to kind of accomplish just that. It was totally worth it, though.

Standout tracks:

Malignant Matters Collapse
Ridiculous Preacher
Injured by Extrasensorial Communication
Undethronement of Inner Power
Old Man Decrepit Frozen
Master Of Knowledge

Iwrestledabearonce - It's All Happening

Am I behind the times? Do I live under a rock? No, scratch that. Do I live on a planet a light year away and just heard about these guys Iwrestledabearonce a few months ago, and it is actually 2010 as I write this? Seeing as I've already reviewed Aesthethica and Proliferation Of Disaster, I guess that no, it's 2011 all right. Yet here I am right now, reviewing Iwrestledabearonce's first album, with the intent of giving it a rating higher than -27 out of 5. Am I out of my mind? Do I not know the surefire reasons to hate them that you can revert back to once you're out of options? I do know, actually. They're trendy, PBR drinking, sweater-clad, huge-rimmed-glasses boasting, vintage camera collecting, vinyl supporting, hobo-like, ironic, pretentious, filthy hipsters, and therefore, logically, all that they ever might come up with is the most hateful and outrageous pap ever created. It's not like they even do the tiniest bit of effort to hide their identity. They even made a dubstep EP before dubstep was cool. So what is there, really, not to despise about this collective? Well for one thing, you have the music.

I don't mean that it is outstanding. Far from it. They aren't even all that imaginative, unless you consider playing more than one genre an astounding skill. I don't even mean that it is good. It's All Happening is riddled with problems and can get rather annoying. But it's not bad either. It's acceptable. What Iwrestledabearonce present us with is 10 songs. Each song appears to consist of bits and pieces off various unreleased Iwrestledabearonce songs, and these bits and pieces are connected together either by nothing, or, in some particularly rare cases, absolutely nothing. This means two things: First, that, as a whole, the songs' dynamics are as meditated upon and planned as a play where all the actors suffer from Tourette's; and second, you better get ready to hear lots of unnecessary sudden changes.

All in all, the album is kinda like the musical equivalent of a season of some second-rate sketch comedy. It might have its moments, it might even have some high points, but in the end you feel indifferent about it. A great example of this is the song “White Water in the Morning”. It goes perfectly well for the first two minutes, with masterful deathcore and a fantastic progression, but then the whole song, as well as my interest, is destroyed by a riff that comes out of nowhere and fails epically to change the direction the song was going in. The track limps around aimlessly for about a minute, and then settles for an unengaging riff to make an illogical fade out with. I don't think there was even a single song that I liked all the way through. There was always the out-of-place riff, lack of album flow, or even just downright boring material to partially ruin each of them.

I understand that Iwrestledabearonce are supposed to be a joke and all, I get that. But I still think that they should have worked on their strengths, rather than meticulously arranging the most random salad possible. Because they do have strengths. In fact, I believe they have all it takes to make music that is interesting. They have a knack for writing great, catchy melodies. Not to mention their proficiency in writing fantastic breakdowns, groovy and riddled with delicious subtleties. Besides, the members appear to be good behind their respective instruments.

The band only has itself to blame for all the hate it gets, though. Because if they were joking it means that they repeated the same joke 9 times too many. And if they weren't, then they simply disregarded the “songwriting” part of writing a song, named it their thing rather than a mistake, and got what they deserved.  Still, I try not to care about the meaning behind music. I try to give all the of importance to the actual music. And looking at It's All Happening that way, you have a nice, kind of fun album.

Standout tracks:

You Ain't No Family
Tastes Like Kevin Bacon
Eli Cash Vs. The Godless Savages
See You In Shell

Purulent Jacuzzi - Vanished In The Cosmic Futility

If potable water doesn't become a commodity in the future, free time will. In this age where the vicious cycle of debt and hopelessness that is getting a college degree is the most basic necessity for any job in existence, and retirement is but a quickly waning fad, the only thing that actually lies in the future for most of us is working as a means of survival. Forever. And ever. Until coronary and then “The End”. And, well, work is just getting more ruthless by the week. I haven't even left high school yet and I already find myself running from room to room, developing less time-consuming ways of gulping down food and concocting an all-week schedule that includes every detail from how much I sleep to exactly when I take a shit, all so that I can manage to savor some precious moments of relaxation, occasionally.

I really envy the people who decide to see a movie and then see it within the same week. I've given up on books and video games ages ago, and now I don't even have the time to listen to music anymore. I don't have the time to create music anymore. Fuck, I don't even have the time to sleep anymore! Succeeding is all about developing this balance between work and social life, meanwhile dying inside the whole time. And it amounts to fuck all. The only reason I allow myself to get all worked up here right now is because no one ever reads this shit anyway!

Alright, sorry about that. I guess that if you've read this far you do want an actual review. Well, my point with that wall of text was that, to me, albums such as Vanished In The Cosmic Futility are like a godsend. Why listen to Geogaddi, The Wall, or The Galilean Satellites for over an hour, when I can take in as much information from under 14 minutes of Purulent Jacuzzi's mindrape? And I mean this without a hint of sarcasm. This does rape the mind and I do love it.

What we have here is a very catchy, refined and natural-sounding mix of slam death metal with assorted grindcorisms, the occasional flourish of technicality, and a very original riffing style to boot. The musicians are excellently precise and very proficient, and the production joins it all together like no other. If those two sentences right now didn't convince you to give this a listen, I don't know what will. I guess I might try exploring a bit more detail.

The first thing that pops out when listening to Vanished In The Cosmic Futility is just how perfect the sound is. It's raw, screechy, punchy and gives you a rush. I have never before heard a BDM album with such a fitting sound. The vocalist also deserves a mention for doing right everything that the one from Waking the Cadaver did wrong, and to great effect. Everyone else is not far behind, providing instrumentation that is easy to follow despite its creativity. Structure-wise, there's not much of interest for the most part, but you get some very nice subtleties here and there. For the most part it's the grindcore style of linear “Riff1, then Riff2, then Riff3, then Riffx” endeavor, only with the “awesome per second” gauge too far up. And the riffs are something worth talking about. Every single one of them appears to have been crafted to perfection to create a style simultaneously very abstract and groovy. And then you get moments of guitar orgasms while the drums follow accordingly, and these moments are incredible.

The only actual problem I have with this album, a problem which is minuscule in comparison to the positive aspects, is the same that appears to plague every BDM album, and that is a cheesy intro and  uncompelling outro. Admittedly, without them the whole experience would have been under a quarter of an hour long, but I don't really mind. This is an album of unbridled intensity teaming up with creativity and attention to quality, and the two bookends are rendered rather insignificant by the constant magnificence of the rest. I'm not saying that Vanished In The Cosmic Futility has helped me find meaning in my life or spare time, but it is a perfect soundtrack for while I'm looking for it, and after.

Standout tracks:

Last Phase Of Leptospiriosis
Quadriplegia
Spastic Disphonia
Vortex Of The Inanity
Contagious Dementia
Rapture Of The Venous Vessels (New Version)
Pulsatory

Meatus - Inner Demons

Here's something I've come to notice: If I spend more time thinking of an album than listening to it, it'll usually mean that I like it way more than what's considered socially acceptable. For instance, I have this ritual of pulling out the Worlds Beyond the Veil CD and staring at it for a while, and then putting it back in with the rest of the CDs, all the while having a disturbingly happy expression. For the record, last time I listened to Worlds Beyond the Veil from first track to last was in June. The music within the release is so valuable to me that I avoid using it for its original intent, out of fear of having it ruined forever. Also, I prefer not listening to it because I don't like feeling disappointed. Yes, I am implying that it's about time I found a new favorite album ever.

Which brings us to Meatus's Inner Demons twofold. First, because this is not going to be my new all time favorite album, and second, because of how I know that. Without even getting into the musical aspect of the album yet, I'll mention the thing about knowing if I really love an album again. Like I said, if I spend more time thinking about an album than hearing it, it's usually because I adore it. And I stress the word “usually”, because there is one exception, and that being when an album is absolutely terrible. Inner Demons fits into this second category like a glove: ever since I first listened to it, I have thought about it daily, and then proceeded to have variable amounts of success at suppressing a need to burst out laughing. In fact, it fits so well into this latter category that it just so happens to be the new worst album I've ever listened to. Needless to say, I'm practically jumping with joy.

You see, being outrageously terrible is more challenging than being pretty-bad-to-okayish. You need to have some sort of idea of the rules to follow to make an acceptable release, and then you need to have the guts to consciously disregard them. I'm not saying that Anal Cunt are more talented than Nouvelle Vague, but, then again, I totally am. And Meatus know they're mildly talented. They know it so well that they use every opportunity they can to show off their uncanny ability of playing more than one genre. In the mean time, they only sacrifice a few unimportant things, such as sense of progression, dynamics, and being listenable. The result of this attempt at ultra-originality is a mix of some of the least interesting riffs in the history of death metal with a wad of the worst characteristics of every genre to have emerged in the last 40 years or so, all carefully arranged together by a tornado.

To give you a quick example, I'll describe the intro on the first track, which goes by the name of “Slave – Do It, End It All Now”. Oh, and have I mentioned the names of the songs here? They range from things like “Yeast – Societies Outcast”, to “G.H.B. - Sex Drugs Rock-n-Roll-n-Humility”, to the particularly clever “Spoken – ConfusionCONFUSIONnoisufnoc???”, but I digress. The opening song starts with (*gasp*) a piano sample playing (*GASP*) an arpeggio. Then, after a few repetitions, (*massive heart attack*) a clean guitar begins following the piano very badly while there's a sample of an e-mail about taking care of kids and hating the guts out of another person speaking on top. Randomly, the guitarist hits the distortion and begins to make some guitary noises. This whole sequence prolongs for the whole length of the e-mail about going to scouts with your son, giving guitar lessons, dance , and checking the daughter's FUCKING homework, before the whole thing settles down, leaving only the piano to play a few melancholic notes before being cut out mid-phrase, as a way to introduce the listener to the mega-dramatic death-metally / boring-beyond-comprehension introductory riff. And that's when the album begins to show off its extreme intensity and skull-crushing power by segueing into a post rock interlude for no apparent reason other than taking up space. Just as you start noticing how good Meatus are with post rock, the song cuts to a hip hop sample of someone saying “You don't like how I'm living, well, fuck you”, and we're back at the very uninteresting death metal. It takes one more introductory riff to actually get to the main theme, and all this amounts to an intro that in total takes up 3:30 minutes of the 7:56 minute song, and is completely unfulfilled.

All in all, the detours that are taken along the way eventually begin to sound like the band is making fun of you, and you wish they would stop doing them. But when the detours are not taken, the band has more of a chance to let shine through their complete inability to make a consistently engaging riff progression. A good example of this is “Ribo – Drugs Can't Erase The Memories”, which starts out relatively tolerable, until you realize that every single riff is a random combination of power chords an 11-year old could come up with by having a coughing fit, and that the order at which they're presented only makes them more torturous. The song is rendered even more terrible by the fact that every song prior and after that one is pretty much the same in that aspect. I think the fault here is of the guitars. They're so uninspired that they drag everyone else down to their level. The vocalist is quite skillful, the bass sometimes makes some cool chops and the drummer should have been looking for a better band in the first place, but the guitars are just lame! I think there are only about three worthwhile guitar parts in the whole album, and one of them sounds like the Batman theme.

I guess these guys were trying to out-weird and out-experimental everything else in existence and decided to do so in the cheapest, easiest and most gimmicky way possible. And I have to say that, in their own way, they have succeeded. Inner Demons IS absolutely bizarre. Its production is some of the most subtly perplexing I've heard yet, and the premise itself is a recipe for something of at least mild interest, meanwhile in execution it's even more tedious than James LaBrie's Elements of Persuasion. It really makes you stop and think, the way that something so chock-full of surprises and unexplained twists can sum up to something more boring than silence itself. How does that even work?! With this, my conclusion is the following: don't let my rating discourage you. Find this album and listen to it. If you have ever stopped to stare at a car accident, or considered doing so, this ought to spark your interest.



Standout tracks:

Spoken – ConfusionCONFUSIONnoisufnoc???

Tides - Resurface

Yes, I'm back. I trust that you won't ask me what caused this interval because you don't exist, but if you are curious, the answer is much more boring than you think.

More and more am I starting to despise post-metal, and through no fault of the music itself. You know how annoying Tool fans tend to ruin Tool for everyone else? Well, it's worse than that. The genre has been given this status as being “the new classical music”, “the thinking man's Metal”. It has been declared deep and intelligent, as opposed to other Metal, which is just pointless noise and yelling. And enjoying it will make you automatically superior to anyone who doesn't. All in all, post-metal is, supposedly, intellectuals' music. The reality, though, is that calling it intellectuals' music is similar to someone stating that they are a doctor because they watch a lot of House M.D.

One of the main things that is supposed to set post-metal apart is the consistent use of dynamics and contrasts, and even that it doesn't do well. It tends to suffer from the same problem that post-rock does, in that the songs will emphasize so much on being quiet and then being loud and then being quiet again and then being very loud that they fall completely apart once a change is called for. The dynamics are generally entirely superficial and will amount to virtually nothing. And that is a theme that seems to spread among all of post-metal's characteristics. It is superficial, and amounts to virtually nothing.

Of course, I'm not saying this to imply that the entire genre is crap. It does have its fair share of genuinely challenging and well thought out material, rather than stuff that pretends to be. Resurface, for instance, pretends to be challenging and well thought out, but it pretends so well that you can hardly distinguish it from the real thing. It's one of those releases that doesn't try to hide its true nature: It's all about atmospheric candy, nice soundscapes, pleasant melodies, pleasing buildups, and overall just massaging the eardrums. It's pretty up front about all that. But beneath this layer, there is also an evident attention to structure, album flow, progression, and to making sure that the music is not too predictable. The riffs are your usual post-metal ones, maybe with a little more emphasis on cohesion than usual. Nothing truly remarkable, but nothing bad either. They're definitely playing safe, but they pull it off well enough.

For the first half of Resurface, you could even be led to believe that we have here an incredible album! The songs segue into each other in a very satisfying manner, with some tasteful sharp contrasts letting the album keep moving forward. But eventually you encounter some problems. Tides's timing is just a tiny bit off, which damages the listening experience far more than it should. They don't experiment at all with the contrasting dynamics thing either. My biggest beef with this release, though, is the lack of stuff in it. It's not that it's too short, it's just that it doesn't have enough to sink your teeth into. They have found their own sound within the genre, but they also made it so pointlessly specific that a great part of what they do sounds like filler. And while they definitely show the intention of covering a lot of ground, the end result is still rather samey. I would go so far as to say that the opening track is the only one that doesn't sound like it was mostly churned out in a particularly successful jam session, for example. And I wouldn't be too shocked if I found out that all the even numbered tracks were, in fact, particularly successful jam sessions.

Fortunately, the effect of all these shortcomings is hindered by just how pleasant the sounds in this album are. Think of it as a dish of some of the most beautiful food you have ever seen, and the only problem with it is that it's actually wax. You can just enjoy staring at the sculpture all day, no one asks you to actually eat it.


Standout tracks:

Resurface
Aurora
Sirens Fade

Malignancy - Inhuman Grotesqueries

There have been simpler times. Don't take that statement as me being nostalgic and contradicting a previous review, though. I'm merely stating that, some time in the past, there was an interval of time when things were less complex than they are in the present. Take, for example, the Cambrian period: back then all you had to do was swim around and evolve extremely slowly. No worries about global economy, taxes, jobs and such. Also, if someone had played an ultra-technical solo back then, they would have been praised like gods, and subsequently eaten. Save for the being eaten part, I always get the impression that the rest of the previous sentence also applies to mostly any time until about since a decade ago. Ever since then, showing technical prowess appears to have become something close to “masturbating at Starbucks” in the Frowned-Upon-o-Meter.

I'm not saying that that's necessarily a bad thing. I hate wading through 3 minute solos for something to happen as much as the other guy, but I don't believe that those instances alone are enough to justify dismissing anything fast and shreddy and confusing as “wankery”. The worst part of this is that people seem to ignore a more refined style of overly technical music, that employs technicality not to destroy fingers, but to challenge minds. Enter Inhuman Grotesqueries, where being as mind-annihilatingly unfollowable as possible takes as much of a backing role as it takes the center role. At face value, this is even more of a pure wankfest than Inhuman Rampage, what with the drummer going berserk at random moments, and the pinch harmonics that are present for about half the album length, and the vocalist mostly saying variations of “HORRR”. But after repeated listens and after analyzing the album time and again, it becomes apparent that this umpteen-notes-per-second music is more of an exercise in controlled unpredictability, rather than a self-indulgent orgy.

Look at the guy on the cover. That's pretty much what the music is like. Malignancy seem to have learned a characteristic way to pick up normal brutal death metal songs and then warp them to the point of unrecognizability. They have many tools to do this, such as the mid-riff spasms of technicality, random speeding up and speeding down, and ingenious bridges that turn out to be riffs, to name a few. Mix that with an unusual  but obvious style of rhythmically challenging riffing and you have yourself enough ingredients to perfect a half-hour of very strong material. Really, they don't change the formula much, if at all. Just to get an idea of what I mean, the only track with something even remotely reminiscent of dynamics and melody is the song “Xenotransplantation”. Listen to “Xenotransplantation” and tell me if it's very dynamic or melodic. Not that this matters much, though. Because of how intricately tailored the music is, with nice details to pick up every now and all the freaking time, there's no reason for any more elements to be present.

One way or another, though, it's up to you, the listener, to make sense of Inhuman Grotesqueries. And your situation is not so good. You'll find yourself relistening song sections to understand where you are almost constantly, and you better get ready for a lot of frustration if you're going to venture into trying to make sense of the chaos. I do recommend that you do, though, because when you do, you actually begin to realize how well written the material here really is. Believe me, the songs do make at least a little bit of sense once they're dissected deep enough. This album is kinda like a jar of chocolate chip cookies, if the cookies were mixed with sushi, beef stroganoff, lutefisk and a slight hint of smoked owl. It's a level above the regular stuff, and it's the sort of thing you ingest calmly and with an open mind, enjoy it for what it is and have to learn to appreciate. Even after having proven myself worthy, though, after the eighth Aberration Cookie I just want a regular one.

Standout tracks:

Indigenous Pathogen
Predicated Malformations
Embryological Teratomas
Benign Reabsorption
Xenotransplantation