Originally written by Chris Redar
In one form or another, Legion of the Damned has been around since 1990. Known as Occult before 2005, these Netherlands thrashers proceeded to release four full-lengths in three years under their new moniker. Even by thrash standards, that’s pretty prolific. Taking their time afterwards, the band released Descent into Chaos in 2011, and now we are presented with their latest, Ravenous Plague.
Take notice of how poorly executed and dull that opening paragraph is- it’s an allusion to the listening experience of this album. Clocking in at forty-five minutes, Ravenous Plague feels like a lifetime on the ends of the gray matter. Paint drying would be bored to tears trying to finish this in one sitting. It is that bad- possibly even worse.
Let’s kick the laundry list off with the most important bullet- these are just awful songs. “Howling for Armageddon” is an exercise in irritation. The riff is bland and straightforward, which would be fine if anything else was providing the entertainment. If you had placed a bet on that not happening, you probably would just be getting your money back, because the odds are 1:1. The percussion section is so irritatingly produced that it’s next to unbearable. In particular, the snare and the ride cymbal are heinous. Oddly enough, every other piece of the kit sounds pretty good. But that ride is about as appealing to the ears as a bunch of tiny cactus needles on the end of a cotton swab. And the snare sounds so old and loose that you can almost hear the rattle of the springs. Off-putting, to say the least.
Most of these tracks hover around the four-and-a-half minute mark. Not a single one needed to be more than two. “Ravenous Abominations” clocks at almost six. It feels like twenty. Years. Twenty years. That’s not even an exaggeration. And have the vocals even been mentioned yet? They’ll make you appreciate everyone in your life that has thought better of starting a band. Maurice Swinkels, bless his heart, has a very hypnotic tone. That is, if ‘hypnotic’ meant ‘bland and yawn-inducing’.
For a band that has nearly twenty-four combined years under its belt, it’s incredibly odd that something this underdeveloped and amateurish is being released as a final product. This honestly sounds like a bunch of b-sides culled over the years as opposed to a finished and polished full-length. All at once bland, uninspired, and dated-sounding, Ravenous Plague might be the first least-essential album of 2014.
