Malefice – Entities
Malefice at Myspace (chugga chugga WEE!)
Malefice are getting quite big in the UK with the kids. That if anything else should tip you off that these guys aren’t going to appeal to most of you. Malefice specialise in the sound of metalcore circa 2003/2004 and if this record came out then I’d at least see what the hypes about. “Entities” takes Unearths poor structuring, As I lay Dying’s Melodic Death plagiarism, Lamb of Gods boneheaded good ol boy ambience and Chimaira’s 100% pure distilled shite-ness and turns them into something quite horrid. If you like those 4 bands you will probably like this, but if you hate them, well you’ll despise this.
I think subconsciously they took influence from Dragonforce as apart from the occasional curveball such as Howard Jones-esque clean vocals (which is as curveballs go is positively straight in this instance) the tracks are near enough exactly the same. They start off with a pseudo-melodic death intro go into a Lamb of God style verse, going into a breakdown with some melodic leads over the tops of it style chorus and so forth. Now if it was A B A B it would be pretty awful in itself, but in-between those are the occasional half-arsed solo’s and a whole battalion of breakdowns. You have your Lamb of god breakdowns, your Chimaira breakdowns and occasionally just for variety some unusual and relatively unorthodox Unearth breakdowns.
The breakdowns usually last for between a third and a fourth of the songs length. Unless you are Earth Crisis you really can’t get away with that. There was a reason that Obituary and Grave only let the breakdowns on “Cause of Death” and “Into the Grave” respectively last for an exquisitely short period of the songs timespan. If Malefice cut the amount of breakdowns in their songs down, they would be horribly average instead of just horrible. If you want to play metalcore where you play endless breakdowns then play tough guy hardcore there’s a whole sub-genre of that sub-genre of a sub-genre dedicated to that. It just doesn’t work at all if for the remaining part of the songs timespan you play melodic death-lite you learned by osmosis from various metalcore outfits.
Put this together with some retarded tough guy lyrics that even Phil Anselmo would be ashamed of, and the gradual realisation that Malefice are so addicted to breakdowns that sometimes their verse guitar lines are basically incredibly fast breakdowns, then this is another sorry example of British metal gone wrong.
Sunday, August 10th, 2008 @ 8:13 am 
