Trephination - With War Come Atrocities

Trephination official website

After looking back at the fifteen reviews I’d written so far for this site, I realized that out of them, only one was fully negative, two were mediocre, two were guilty pleasures, and the rest were positive. I came to a conclusion: I need to review more shit. Some background: I found this 3-song EP in a used bookstore attached to the Free Library in Philadelphia. Most of the CDs there were stuff no one would ever want, but I’d found a few gems there, and I was curious about this, wondering out of sheer morbid curiosity what it would sound like. Well, it was just as bad as I feared.

First of all, the lyrics are terrible. “Cloned Reoccurences” starts with some genetic technobabble, and continues with some horrible lyrics about how someone’s clone is committing atrocities. At one point, the phrase “50,000 less niggers” is mentioned- yes, Trephination is a white power band. “Threading the Twine” is a hackneyed song about suicide by hanging, and “Citadel” is an equally cliched song about the Eastern front in WWII.

But the lyrics wouldn’t matter that much if the music were good. Unfortunately, it completely sucks. The vocalist sounds like he’s hacking up phlegm (in a bad way), the riffing is completely generic, the solos sound out of place, the bassist might as well have stayed home, and the drumming frequently sounds like one of those wind-up monkeys. Trephination don’t have any releases to their name besides this, and it’s not hard to see why; apparently, they weren’t even good enough to hack it in the white power scene. Stay far away from this one.