Drain of Impurity – The Seventh Planet of the Infected Cygnus System

I feel like there’s a really great concept somewhere in here. I can feel the space exploration gone wrong, and how a nobel crew gets torn limb from limb by ghastly space monsters. The problem is the music just doesn’t do it justice. This is a good piece of brutal death metal, but there’s nothing that matches the concept attempted. It’s a short album, which is good for a genre that doesn’t exactly bring a lot of variety to the table. But even then there isn’t enough substance for the album to reach it’s potential. I love the intros to each track, and I love that they build a sort of story. But it’s not executed as well as it needed to be to be a fantastic album.

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6.75/10

https://drainofimpurity.bandcamp.com/album/the-seventh-planet-of-the-infected-cygnus-system

Deceptionist – Initializing Irreversible Process

When it comes to reviews I’m definitely one for laying down arguments and describing exactly what I did and did not like in an album. Kind of. Ok I mostly just say shitty metaphors for 1000 words, but you get the idea. I try to make my reviews have at least some logic to them. It’s been a while since I just threw that out the window and said “fuck, I just like this album”. Imma bust that shit out for this romparoo.

Deceptionist’s Initializing Irreversible Process is about a stereotypical as you can get in terms of aesthetic. Lots of tech death bands go for that monstrous, mechanical, apocalypse by machine approach that is cliche to the point of annoyance at this point. And I can say plenty of bad things about this album. The machine gunning guitars, while sounding wicked cool at first, sort of like someone drilling the mechanical components onto the body during the process of turning man into machine (which is I assume the irreversible process here), they eventually start drilling into your ears a bit too much and get annoying. The riffs, I’ll be honest, are just not great. Mediocre I would say, which means on a scale of microbrew stout to Iron City, is around Rolling Rock, if that. It’s also a tad repetitive, though I do enjoy Sunshine and Operator No.3 for having a bit more of a melodic focus, which is not to be unexpected for a brutal tech death album, but still is a negative.

But frankly, I don’t give a shit. I like it. It really executes the mechanical machine aesthetic better than almost any other tech death album I’ve heard. That machine gunning guitars feel like bolts being filled in. The riffs feel like artificial intelligence being programmed into the new abominations. The vocals even have this perfect balance between human and slightly inhuman. It’s hard to describe, but there’s this slight stoicism to the vocals that that makes it work. It doesn’t feel like some void creature is singing, but rather some flesh/steel hybrid beast, squealing both in pain of the process, yet declaring the glorious victory for the machine race.

This album doesn’t really do anything technical that I haven’t heard done before, and done better. But sometimes you don’t need that. Sometimes all you need to make an enjoyable album is to go with a theme and use music to fill the listeners imagination with that theme as much as possible. And for all of their faults Deceptionist does this in style, marking maybe not a milestone in death metal this year, but certainly a marker for how aesthetic is crafted in death metal albums for the rest of the year.

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7/10

Syphilic – The Indicted States of America

I feel like bands only over use edgy movie scene samples to make up for the fact that their music is slightly above average at best. No different here.

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5.75/10

Wormed – Krighsu

If a group of cybernetically enhanced space worms from across the universe lusted to conquer other life forms lower them themselves, took their kooky spaceship to planet earth, got here, started fucking shit up hardcore, raping the women and children with penises half their size, burning everything down with space lazers, and eventually leave the planet a desolated wasteland. But in the rubble they find, of all things, a suffocation album. And they listen to it via telekinetic worm-jitsu and are blown away. Then they look into each others wratlygles and speak to each other through their assholes “You know what, fuck the conquering thing, let’s make music”. This is the album they would make.

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8.25/10

Brutus – Murwgebeukt ALBUM REVIEW

If you like not being able to hear for a few minutes afterwards, this is the album for you. Full on brutality for almost an hour, which was too much for me, the total wuss that I am. I don’t normally review brutal death metal because there isn’t much to review. Most albums sound very similar to each other, and don’t have much content to actually review. It’s really just a question of how fun it was to listen to, and here I can say about a moderate amount. I got a good laugh at the production value and literal unintelligible lyrics and music. But the album is just too long for what it’s supposed to be, and there’s really nothing I hear here that I haven’t heard in another album just like it.

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5.75/10

Castrensis – Hierarchies ALBUM REVIEW

Brutal death is not a genre I typically listen to. Pig squeal vocals and little variety between songs is not something I really want to take in on a regular basis. However this album has a saving grace to it: it’s only 21 minutes long. That may seem insulting that the best feature of this album is it’s short length, however I would argue that it is an immense strength. It makes it so that you don’t get overly tired with the repetitive nature of the album, and can fully appreciate everything it has to offer without expending too much of your time. It’s said that the human attention span is roughly around 20 minutes, then people start to tune things out and not remember aspects of what they heard. This just fits in that, so I’d say that it does a good job giving you a short and sweet album that gets it’s message across without the chance for you to forget about it.

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7/10

Visceral Decay – Implosion Psychosis ALBUM REVIEW

Not much to say about this. It has some cool moments. The riffs are about 60/40 in terms of good/bad, getting better when they’re more atonal. The technical passages that are there aren’t really that amazing, but not really bad. The one thing I can talk about is the drums. God man those are really bad. The band sounds like they’re literally using a fisher price drum set. Fortunately it’s brutal death metal, so nobody gives a shit. Average album, not bad not great.

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5.5/10

Prion – Uncertain Process

Atonal riffing, awful production, and drumming that seems like the musical equivalent of a shooting spree. Yeah, this is good. REAL good. In my personal opinion, when I comes to death metal, the more I want to kill someone afterwards, the better it is. Metaphorically at least, I actually find extreme music very relaxing. I took a nap to this a few days ago in fact, slept like a baby. Regardless, if I actually was inclined that way, I definitely would want to kill someone after listening to this, which in my mind makes for an awesome record. One of the best death metal releases this year.

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8.25/10