Originally written by Chris Chellis.
Legends die hard. Or so they say. These German thrashers die pretty damn slowly. Twelve songs and one Guerrero tortilla chips bag later and I am left with a belly full of salsa and nothing to speak for besides relative boredom. A good album? Far from it. It’s not that Marcel Schirmer didn’t try to create something worth listening to here. In fact, judging from the energetic vibe one generally gets from Inventor of Evil, there was a lot of tinkering that went on in the studio for the three guys that now make up Destruction. In fact, what’s most troubling about this album is the very fact that these guys tried and it’s evident, without much of a positive result in sight. Cries of sellout won’t do, as was the case for some with Death Angel, and they certainly didn’t bend over backwards to accommodate the sizable penis of the pressures of modernity as some would argue Exodus did, but one gets the sense through listening to Inventor of Evil that “Schmier” and company held back. Realizing that “I am not feeling it” won’t suffice to describe my opinion as a reviewer, I will attempt to describe how I arrived at a state of boredom with this album. Peter Tägtgren produced the album, a fact that will turn off some but turned me on before I even listened to the album myself. In other words, I wanted to like this album. Thrash being one of my favorite genres of metal, I was hoping for something that might make it into my top ten of 2005. These guys are legends right? Well, at least Schirmer is a legend. Uh oh. I am already beginning to make excuses. Not a good sign. Is it also a good sign that Schirmer felt the need to incorporate an outright gimmick by pleading with nine vocalists to gangbang one song? Probably not. While not a total disaster, “The Alliance of Hellhoundz” is completely unnecessary. Nine vocalists essentially do what Schirmer could do himself. I imagine some money was spent on that little adventure, and if I were Schirmer, I’d be wishing like hell right now that there were a time machine so I could go back a few months and spend the money on some weekend booze. That said, hearing Messiah Marcolin on a thrash track was interesting in and of itself, and the gimmick works in the sense that it grabs attention. Unfortunately, when attention has been gotten, it does little to impress. There seems to be such little variation on this album that what I am left reviewing is one lump smelly sum of 50 minutes and 36 seconds. Solid? Yes. Aggressive? Yes. Interesting? No. “No Man’s Land” contains some solid riffs, but nothing that really grabs the listener in the way that “Thrown to the Wolves” did on Death Angel’s The Art of Dying. “Thrown to the Wolves” was visceral and passionate. It wasn’t faux passion thrown in a stew of mediocrity for the sake of releasing a product. At least that album had some variation going for it. There’s an element of distinctiveness that keeps me coming back to The Art of Dying that I can’t immediately describe but is nonetheless there. Inventor of Evil doesn’t have that same distinctiveness. Hell, I could listen to Heathen’s three-song demo for the same attempt at ferociousness and even hear it in an accomplished form, rather than subjecting myself to tediousness. Schirmer’s voice is par for the course. The riffs are uninspired, outside of “Dealers of Hostility.” Inventor of Evil is the definition of average. Those that are starving for thrash metal might want to give the album a greater chance than those generally disinterested by the genre. Keep in mind that to starve means to suffer from deprivation. Thrash fans have not been deprived in 2005. With albums like Municipal Waste’s Hazardous Mutation, there’s bigger fish out there than this flounder.
