Chalk - Dead World

You probably noticed that this review doesn’t have an album cover accompanying it. That’s because I couldn’t find a single reference to this band on the internet. I got this album from a friend on the Internet in digital form. Chalk was a two-piece death metal/rap hybrid from Detroit that released this album in 1996 and nothing else. I don’t really care for any type of rap, but there’s something about this album that entertains me despite how bad it is.

First, the metal elements are pretty superficial. The real emphasis of this album is the lyrics, and man, are they ever a doozy. They’re some of the most offensive stuff I’ve ever heard. The subject matter is similar to early Cannibal Corpse; if Chris Barnes had become a rapper instead of a death metal singer, he might have lyrics like these. (I would go into more detail, but my mom reads my reviews here so I won’t.) It’s like they were trying to go out of the way to cover all the bases of offensiveness; in addition to the typical lyrics about rape and murder, the occasionally throw in a few anti-Christian lyrics. The rhyming is pretty insipid; a typical example is “surgeon” and “virgin”. Profanity is way over used; I counted 40 F-bombs in the second song, which is six and a half minutes long. There are also some samples from “true crime” shows, including a truly sickening one from a child murderer that I had to skip over. They also lifted the opening from Black Sabbath’s debut album for the beginning of the last track, something any fan of real metal would recognize, but which would go over the heads of nu-metal fans.

I’m not entirely sure why I reviewed this album. As mentioned above, there’s barely any metal in it even for a nu-metal album, I hate rap so I can’t really judge it by that genre’s standards, and it’s so obscure that no one’s likely to find it anywhere. I still kind of enjoy it despite its lyrics, but I’m definitely laughing at these guys instead of with them.