Jaldaboath at Myspace

When I heard that Jaldaboath (real name James Fogarty) was recording a solo EP, I was anxious to hear the results. He was a founding member of one of my favorite metal bands, The Meads of Asphodel. However, when I actually got around to hearing this EP, it turned out to be a terrible pile of hoary “medieval” cliches.

Things actually start off fairly well, with a brief intro track leading into “Bring Me the Head of Metatron.” Folk metal has never been one of my favorite subgenres, but this opening track isn’t bad at all. However, things take a turn for the worse for the next three tracks, which use cheesy synthesized “medieval” instruments and have terrible lyrics that not even a Monty Python sketch would touch.  The final track, “Da Vinci’s Code,” isn’t quite as bad as what preceded it, but it’s too late to save the EP. What I loved about the Meads was that they were always going off in different directions; not all of their experiments worked, but they were always interesting. None of that experimentation is in evidence here; it’s just cliche after cliche after cliche.

Now, I don’t hate silliness in metal. I love many bands I find to be incredibly silly; I find the anti-Christian sentiments of many bands to be hilarious, and the macho posturing of bands like Manowar sends me into conniptions. But Hark the Herald is just played too straight for me to get any laughs out of it.  If it’s meant seriously, it’s terrible. If it’s meant as a joke, it’s not funny. This is one of the most disappointing releases of 2008 in my opinion.

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.

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.