Katalepsy at myspace

If a bunch of sissy hardcore boys make a facsimile of death metal with breakdowns and shitty gimmick vocals then it is deathcore and thus bad but if a bunch of guys singing about gore and death and whatever with long hair do the same its “slam death metal” apparently. One is the bane of extreme metal and the other is a perfectly acceptable evolution of Death Metal despite both sounding the same. As it turns out Katalepsy aren’t a bunch of pale skinny mid-western white boys with stretched ear lobes and Atticus hoodies, but a bunch of tough as nails Russian dudes.  They might as well be the former as that’s the music they make though.

I have nothing against mixing Hardcore with Death Metal when it is done with the imagination, innovation and an eye to detail that all good music is made with, let’s be honest the shit to good ratio in Deathcore is pretty high. The breakdowns on “Musick Brings Injuries” are more On Broken Wings than Obituary and the Death Metal segments are more repetitive than you would find in Bona Fide Death Metal seeming to sound like a  Down syndrome version of Mortician. There’s conveniently a Mortician cover on this album along with a hilarious Deathcore version of “Symphony of Destruction”. That means that a quarter of the time on this album is other peoples material and its better constructed than Katalepsys original tracks, which being one of the artists in question is Mortician is really saying something.

The thing that really sucks though is the vocals. What these knuckleheads want to be is more “extreme” than anyone else. They can’t play faster, heavier or more technically than anyone else, so they make the vocals more “extreme” which in this case means making them sound like a cross between a pig and a cricket and never singing in time once. Not in an endearing Paul Baloff way but in can’t go more than 5 seconds before going out of sync with the musicians. It seems that since your average deathco…. Oops I mean Slam Death musician can’t play better than anyone else that have to make the vocalist make as many silly ill fitting sounds as possible to be the most “BROOTAL”.

At the end of the day this variety of metal as exhibited by Katalepsy and their much more musically proficient but still vocally untalented forefathers Devourment has as much influence over the overall death metal scene as Velvet Caccoon or Les Legions Noire had over the Black Metal scene; a lot of dweebs on the internet talking about it, but nothing really happening. If all these “XSLAMXDEATHX” bands sound like Katalepsy, then that’s certainly a very good thing indeed.

Saturday, December 27th, 2008 @ 11:11 am Core
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