Silencer at Myspace

The first time I heard Silencer, it reminded me of going to my first few metal shows. Those shows were loud, indecipherable and full of aggression. But I was so swept up in the adrenaline and the energy in the room that it didn’t matter too much who was on stage, as long as they were loud and fast. It could’ve been a shitty local band with some pseudo-medical, genital related name like “Vaginitus” or “Penile Immolation” and I wouldn’t have cared, simply because the experience was so exhilarating.

But as you go to more shows, the novelty begins to wear and you start to look for flaws, like how you might notice protruding nose hairs on your girlfriend when all you used to see were her tits.

When I first heard Silencer, I was taken by their relentless riffing, catchy hooks and heartfelt aggression. Songs like Mnemodrone and The Harvest are the kind of things that makes you think back to your first show, in all its sweaty, drunken glory.

Unfortunately, the act grows stale pretty quickly. The speeding guitars and thrashing drums start to sound repetitive and—let’s face it— singer Chad Armstrong isn’t doing much to stoke the coals with his generic but serviceable screams.

That’s not to say this is a bad record, it’s just fairly typical death metal with a twist of thrash. I won’t skip it if it comes up on shuffle, but I’m not going to seek out a Silencer song.

Why you should listen to it
Catchy hooks and waves of guitars make Silencer a nice band to blast when you feel like being an asshole at red lights, solid musicianship and production.

Why you shouldn’t listen to it
Repetitive songs, that wave of guitars starts to feel like maple syrup after awhile, bland vocals adds some staleness and redundancy.

6.5/10

(For Samples Click Artwork)

The Berzerker at Myspace

“The Reawakening” marks The Berzerker’s fourth studio album and also his first, truly, independent release.  After the release of “Animosity”, Luke Kenny was apparently very disillusioned by Earache Records, and the entire record industry as a whole, and decided to create his own record label for his music; he even posted a small movie on how the profits in the music industry is really distributed.  In reality, this is no surprise because the current state of the recording industry is at the weakest state its ever been with everyone having home recording equipment and software that could literally master an album in no time with little to no money needed.  But that is a topic of another time, the music of The Berzerker is really what matters and on this record, he comes out with more force, more focus, and more creativity than he ever has in his last few records.
The album starts off with “Wisdon and Corruption” features a more gabber flavor than his last two albums; not to say that the last few albums were crap or unfocused but the idea of “The Berzerker” was to create a living Death/Gabber band and he did achieve it on “Dissimulate” but the idea can sometimes cloud the creativity or uniqueness of the art.  This album is actually more “artful” than “World of Lies” and “Animosity” put together because Luke decided to not hide his Gabber/DnB side and instead incorporate it into the music.  I, personally, think what he achieved on this record is what he was trying to do with all the albums but maybe the record label wanted a more “conventional” sounding electronic death metal act.

Honestly, after “Animosity”, I thought The Berzerker was going a bit stale because his idea of trying to make the fastest, brutal death metal band/album and when you compare “World of Lies”, “Animosity”, and “Dissimulate” you hear someone trying to create/program drums that are 150x faster than any human drum can create and to a degree it works but after a few attempts, and possibly rehashing of the same patterns, the art of music gets lost.

So when I first heard “The Reawakening”, I was blown away that this record a pattern or structure that made some sense given the music.  The guitars are still ever fast/Carcass-est but the focus on the drums was actually a HUGE breath of fresh air because Luke changed the patterns, for example “Disassembly Line” features a short DnB pause that helps build the song and carries it through force.  The song “Your Final Seconds” starts off with fast Gabber kicks but suddenly stops and goes almost “Breakcore-ish” and then returns to its Industrial Grind.  These little changes and additions to the song structure are the things that made the first Berzerker album soo standout.  In 2000, the self titled masterpiece of “The Berzerker” opened my ears to a new sound in Death Metal and I think was the first, focused example of creativity and imagination being used to recreate a genre that is so set in its own ways.

So what more can I say about this album more than its refreshing to hear this band return to its roots and imagination.  One thing I forgot to mention about this record was that it features, for the first time in the bands history actually, remixes from fans and fellow hardcore techno artists that Luke Kenny has known for sometime.  The promotion for the album began with a songwriting campaign, very similar to Trent Reznor’s Year Zero Remixed campaign, that allowed fans to remix one or two of his songs in anyway that they envisioned it.  Also, the band would choose their favorite remix and the fans would choose theirs and both would end up on the album, which they did.  So not only is this Luke’s best “Berzerker” album but also his gift to fans by giving some of them a chance to appear on a release of this magnitude.

For purchasing information, go to www.berzerkerindustries.com and get the album and the newly released 12″ with bonus remixes.

Cephalectomy at Myspace

Cephalectomy hail from Nova Scotia, and they play a heavily Kataklysm-influenced style of deathgrind which they have dubbed “mystigrind”. Their latest release, The Dream Cycle Mythos, consists of just one 23-minute long song, which goes through multiple segments, including both growling and screeching vocals. Typically fast and brutal grindcore segments are punctuated by creepy synthesizer interludes reminiscent of Morbid Angel’s Formulas Fatal to the Flesh, with a little bit of mid-tempo metal thrown in near the end.

I personally greatly preferred the bear-grunting to the shrieking, but that’s just personal taste. I also didn’t like the use of a drum machine, as Cephalectomy had employed an actual drummer on previous albums, but some of the drum parts are so insanely fast that it’s understandable that they made that choice. One part near the end of the song stuck out to me as being extremely fast and noisy just for the hell of it, but most of the rest of the EP is strong. This release is definitely worth picking up for fans of grindcore and brutal death metal.

Runemagick at myspace

“Dawn of the End” known as “Voyage of Desolation/Dawn of the end” by some is just one in a long line of stellar releases from the Swedish underground veterans. Runemagick’s approach on this album like on all their releases differ from other Doom/Death bands such as Coffins and Disembowelment in that there are no fast Death Metal segments. Every minute of music on this album is at a snails pace yet still retains a definite death metal sound. “Dawn of the End” evokes a sense of hopeless and endless depression. It is a musical mire of brutal despair and unrelenting ugliness.

The first Paradise Lost album, Autopsy, Dream Death, Hellhammer, Eyehategod and Immolation are all certifiable influences on this dark and soul sapping piece of downbeat metal. Whilst the popularity of traditional doom/death in the underground metal scene has fallen and risen over the years, Runemagick have been creating masterpieces in the sub-genre no matter what. This is yet another one of those masterpieces.

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.