Annotations of an Autopsy at Myspace (BREEEEEEEEEEEE!)

For a site named Metal Jerks, we really haven’t been that horrible to any of the bands we’ve reviewed. From my own personal standpoint this is because I usually choose to review albums that I like, and even the ones who do disappoint me, I can at least have respect for what they were trying to achieve. Time to review a few bands I have zero respect for then. First up is Deathcore “sensations” Annotations of an Autopsy who inexplicably rose in popularity due to 14 year old’s on myspace who haven’t heard one actual death metal band, and who’s knowledge of hardcore starts and ends with this week’s copy of Kerrang.

The first track after the intro is the titular opener “Welcome to Sludge City” and the first 30 seconds consists of an exceedingly slow generic breakdown with the sound of a teenage boy trying to do Pig Squeals and ending up running out of breath (viva pro-tools and cut and paste!), with some yobbish gang chants that exclaim “she bleeds from every fucking hole”. So far so shit. This then gives way to a cookie cutter 3 bar pseudo-death metal riff that is repeated over and over again before another very similar riff comes into play and so forth. All the time, the asthmatic sow continues to pant and cough and in attempt to try sound “BR00TAL” or whatever gets teenage boys who wear white belts wet these days. Eventually our good friend, the generic breakdown returns and the clearasil powered XHCX choir breaks into a loving chorus of “when I’m done with you, you won’t have a cunt left”. I guess they will have to save their money up and buy another real doll if that happens.

The rest of the EP is the same but with the wheezing swine having his pathetic squeals shifted up to a ludicrous pitch and some out of time attempts at mathcore within the pseudo-death metal. Its deeply unsettling that the new generation took death metal, one of the few genres in any sort of music where all that mattered was how good you were, not how much you were hyped or how good looking your singer was, and attempted to turn it into another revolting cash cow based on image instead of music.

It wouldn’t be so bad, if these kids listened to actual death metal but apparently those bands whether they formed in 1989 or last month are “old mans metal” and we granddads should get with the times and throw our Autopsy (who I’m guessing AOAA haven’t actually heard of) and Morbid Angel records away and listen to a bunch of fuckwits raping death metal as they have a “buff” lead singer and loads of friends on myspace.

You Know what? Fuck that! You know why? Apart from the obvious reasons of taste, sanity, and intellect, most of the “myspace metal” generation will renounce their musical tastes when they reach 18 and go to University and start listening to NME approved Indie. I’ve seen it happen with Nu Metal, Pop Punk and Emo and I’ll see it happen with this. Six or Seven years ago the likes of   Sugar Coma, Sw1tched, The Kennedy Soundtrack and a load of other shitty nu metal acts were popular. Now no one remembers them at all. That is Annotations of an Autopsy’s fate and it can’t come soon enough for me or any other real metal fan.

Ozzy Osbourne at Myspace

This album’s a guilty pleasure for me. It’s billed as live but clearly heavily overdone in the studio, as the contrast between Ozzy’s drunken rambling and his vocals in the songs themselves is obvious. But still, I enjoy it. Ozzy doesn’t perform any of his solo material, but sticks to songs he performed in Black Sabbath exclusively. Apparently, this album was released in order to compete with the Dio-era Sabbath album “Live Evil”. Randy Rhoads had just died, so he isn’t on this, and he was replaced by Brad Gillis, who would become famous with the AOR band Night Ranger, and he’s really no replacement for either Rhoads or Tony Iommi.

So why do I like this album? For one thing, the bass is awesome. Rudy Sarzo of Quiet Riot and Whitesnake plays on this album, and it makes me wonder why he was wasting his time with those lame pop metal bands, as he’s awesome here with his fuzzy bass tone. But my favorite part of the album is Ozzy’s between-song banter. He is just gloriously drunk, and I kept cracking up over his cries of “LOWDAH! LOWDAH!”, him falsely taking credit for writing the song “Black Sabbath” and yelling “KEEP ON SMOKIN’ IT!” at the end of “Sweet Leaf”. Although I enjoy this album, I can’t really recommend it, but die-hard Sabbath and Ozzy fans might want to check it out.

NOTE: This album is no longer being produced, so check used CD stores or download it on iTunes if you want it. Also, it should be noted that early CD pressings are missing “Sweet Leaf”.

Mithras at Myspace

Mithras has to be one of my favourite recent finds. They actually managed to make their music sound otherworldly and unique, unlike so many other derivative death metal bands. At first, I thought that the album used synthesizers extensively, but after reading an interview with the band, I found out that they were only used during song intros. Guitarist Leon Macey creates some incredible sounds with his guitar that have to be heard to be believed. The band clearly takes more than a little inspiration from Morbid Angel, but still manage to have a sound that stands out among the death metal crowd. Rayner Coss’s vocals are pretty standard death metal fare, but they fit the material quite nicely.

I felt that this album’s only real weakness was the drums. I thought that they might be using a machine, as the blast beats sound awfully mechanical and the band has only two members, but it turns out that Macey plays the drums as well as the guitar. The band would do well to obtain a full-time drummer, but that’s the only real criticism I have. I highly recommend this album to Morbid Angel fans and anyone who enjoys unusual sounds in a death metal setting.

Nachtmystium at Myspace

Nachtmystium are the top American Black Metal band that is active today in the sense that they both apart from the pack and leading it. They were born with the depressive and hate filled persona that is now typical of American Black Metal but they went several steps further than most of their contemporaries with every subsequent release with “Assassins” their fourth and most recent album being the standout so far.

“Assassins” crackles with a vibrant sense of energy rarely seen in the top tier of American Black Metal yet retains the ambience of misanthropic loathing that is the hallmark of this regional scene. It also contains a dramatic sense of dynamism a quality often overlooked by their peers in favour of hypnotic repetitiveness. The influence of Psychedelica and Prog Rock also looms favourably with spacey Robert Fripp style solos and fizzling and bubbling Moogs being examples of this. The influence of Pink Floyd and Hawkwind is seen in spirit if not in body with the mind-bending free flowing but always recurring direction of the melodies on display here.

The lyrics are refreshingly direct and unpretentious yet like most USBM bands still evoke a general distaste for humanity and existence as concepts and yet there are also musical interludes with a deep emotional resonance such as the instrumental “Seasick Part I: Drowned at Dusk” and continuing with a saxophone solo on “Seasick Part II: Oceanborne” that’s sounds like its straight out of the seventies. This is a contender for record of the year, and I would certainly be surprised if any American black metal albums are released that are better in the next 6 months.

The Faceless at Myspace

The Faceless are sometimes wrongly dumped in with the Deathcore camp due to their touring partners, record label and a few breakdowns (which came from Death Metal anyway) that is to be founded littered in the sea of technical Melodic Death Metal. Stylistically nothing new is done here, but it’s done in one hell of an entertaining way. Think about a more melodically inclined Necrophagist mixed with Arsis and some of the Later The Crown material with at least one Grave/Bolt Thrower style breakdown and some nifty keyboards thrown into every song. The only black mark on the record is “Horizons of Chaos 2: Hypocrisy” which sounds like Necrophagist masturbating over On Broken Wings corpse and should have been taken off the record. The other 7 tracks are pretty much quality in the guilty Gothenburg wannabe pleasure stakes.

As previously stated its not exactly reinventing the wheel, but in these day and age finding any sort of new record with a melodic death element that isn’t absolute wank is quite an unusual event so this one can be filed along with Arsis, The Absence and Nightrage as nostalgic but not world shattering music for those of who got into heavier metal via discovering the melodic death metal sound by accident sometime in the early 00’s. I can’t be the only one who by somehow hearing an At the Gates or In Flames song realised there was more to metal than just the classics, and if you have had a similar introduction to metal, you might find some value in something that’s a pleasant trip down memory lane without listening to your nearly worn down copy of “Slaughter of the Soul” again.