Well, I tried to do something special for my 200th review, but I just can't. I tried a huge review of my favorite album, and I can't quite put into words my feelings for it. I considered a big "best of" list or a retrospective of sorts and decided against it. So really, I'm going to go against my natural attention-whore instincts and instead keep it low key, and instead of reining in my bicentennial with bombast and fanfare, I'm just gonna review a shitty, unknown one-man BDM album from Spain. CUE THE FIREWORKS!
For real, With All My Hate is a strange anomaly in a way, because it's the one-man venture of surnameless Oscar, currently the vocalist for (the frankly great) Endless. Dysthymic Disorder here is strange because this Oscar has apparently also played guitar in addition to vocals for Die You and Holocaust (two bands I haven't heard), and the reason that's so odd is because all of the instrumental work here sounds completely inept. I get that brutal death metal is a chaotic, cacophonous style, what this sounds like he put practically zero effort into even making the parts line up. The drum programming blasts away at the most inhuman tempos while the bass sweeps up and down in a nearly nonsensical fashion, complemented by guitars and chug and slam at a seemingly disconnected tempo. This guy can apparently play the guitar, and has participated in at least one competent band with well written, cohesive songs (as brutal and chaotic as they may be), so why oh why does this album sound like it was written by a 15 year old after screwing around with Guitar Pro for one day?
That's not to say everything is bad, "The Tree of Woe" has some excellent tremolo sections, but it's broken up by damn near free-time drums and a riff that I swear is in 5/16 time. Nothing here sounds like it was honed or tweaked or edited, Dysthymic Disorder is an incredibly sloppy first draft of an album that has potential to be a solid, if unremarkable, BDM album if it were to be run through the filter of better songwriters. I feel like this Oscar fellow sat in his room, jamming away like we all do, and whenever he came up with a riff or lead that he liked, he would instantly record it. He wouldn't tweak it in any way, he wouldn't play to a metronome, he would just record a handful of weighty chugs and hammering tremolos and sweeping leads, and would then just base the rest of the instruments around it. The percussion almost never fits with what the rest of the instruments are doing, and it ends up sounding like some bizarre off-time trainwreck. "Social Autism" and "Diseased Mind" are probably the best examples of this. I can at least give the guy some credit for trying to be creative with the bass parts, but it still ends up being nonsensical bloodledoobloodles in the background.
I don't have a whole lot of positive words for Dysthymic Disorder, but I can at least say that this man's other band (you know, the one with other members who know how to rein in and contextualize ideas), Endless, is extremely good. It blows my mind that he can perform vocals in a band who can take these brain-numbingly brutal elements and inject them with a hearty dose of melody and/or restraint, and then turn around and release this completely brainless explosion of half-baked ideas and sheer caveman-level idiot brutality and make it sound so unfocused and grating. There's a good album buried here somewhere, the elements are all there, but the execution is so, so dreadful that it just doesn't stand a chance. Flashes of brilliance pop up in "The Tree of Woe" and "Unanswered", but you aren't missing anything by skipping this.
RATING - 25%
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