Originally written by Chris Redar
This is the toughest type of album to review. Blatantly shitty albums are notoriously easy to drag through the mud, hose off, and then drag again. Good writers tend to avoid those (which, not coincidentally, is why you see so many shitbombs from the fingers of yours truly) and stick to albums that stretch the vocabulary and wear down the spine of the thesaurus to heap praise upon the praise-heapable. But what does one say about an album so vanilla and genre-specifically safe as Scourge of the Formless Breed, the latest from Italy’s Septycal Gorge– an album that, at its very core, only exists as a series of references to other bands that influenced it?
Well, let’s take a look at the three P’s of quality album composition: Pacing, Production, and Passion (for the material, not of the Christ). In terms of flow, The first six songs are completely interchangeable. The only remarkable thing of note out of the bunch is track three, “Slaughter Conceived”, featuring a fadeout almost as long as the song itself. In classic brutal tech-death fashion, the vast majority of what’s presented here is an exhibition for a fictional double-bass competition that all of these drummers secretly have in what I’ve always imagined is a large ring surrounded by men with their hand wraps dipped in broken glass ala Bloodsport. It’s hard not to feel bad for these kitsmen, playing behind guitarists that can only assemble riffs that are lifted directly from other catalogs and bookending them with squeals or open-E chugs.
As for the production, take a guess as to what a brutal tech-death album’s production sounds like. If you said ‘spit-shined from the tip of the helmet to the base of the shaft and so glossed over it sounds like it reads like the CIA’s report on the NSA’, then you win the grand prize (which is the satisfaction of a job well done, of course). Now, this being the standard for the style, it would almost be excusable were it not for the complete lack of emphasis on the double bass. The kicks sound like a trebly wobble. It strips down an already varnished performance from a band light on thrills to begin with, so WHOOPS to whoever mastered this one.
And finally, while these guys can play their instruments, none of them sound like they particularly want to. The vocals are a consistent, unending death metal low. Were there an argument to be made against vocals meaning anything to a band, this album would be a good starting point. And, as usual, barring the odd moment where there is nothing but, the bass is virtually non-existent.
This would get a swift and immediate thumbs down were it not for the last three songs. “Deeds of Eternity” is a complete Cannibal Corpse mid-pace rip, but it’s a damn good impression. “Coil of Nothingness” and “Awakening of the Seven Serpent” then slip into a nice little djentrification zone with fancier fret and footwork then anything that came before it. To stick the strongest material at the end of a series of songs that are safe to the point of becoming infuriating is either the dumbest decision in the history of sequencing, or some kind of genius marketing ploy that I’m not smart enough to figure out. It’s probably both.
Brutal tech-death fans will dig the shit out of this, mainly because that section of fandom is rather non-discerning when it comes to what they think is mind-blowing. Speaking anecdotally, I know more than one person that won’t listen to anything other than this style of over-the-top drumming because it’s clearly the most extreme form of extreme music. So they’ll dig it, as will you other Brutech™ fans out there. For everyone else, this walks the yellow line. Proceed with caution.
