Creeping Death - Wretched Illusions

Who is this for?

I checked this out for one reason and one reason alone, and that's that The Absolute Boy Arthur Rizk handled the mixing and mastering.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, the man is the Scott Burns of this generation and everything he gets his hands on sounds perfect.  Creeping Death is no exception, because Wretched Illusions sounds absolutely gargantuan and every single riff carries the weight of mountains on their backs.  Rizk knocked it out of the park yet again, to the surprise of nobody.

The issue that arises here is that the band themselves... well, they kinda suck.  Or maybe they don't suck, but they are wholly unnecessary.  This is very similar to Genocide Pact's Order of Torment last year, and I have basically all of the same criticisms.  Despite the tempo shifts and pummeling drums, all ten tracks here are remarkably static.  There are occasional bursts of speed and occasional slow parts, but they do little to change the actual momentum of whichever track they appear on.  Wretched Illusions is just plain ol' death metal in the most generic and uninteresting sense.  We're in the middle of an apparently decade-long groundswell of bands aping the styled of death metal classics from the 90s, and due to the oversaturation of young artists deliberately treading well-covered ground we're bound to get bands like Creeping Death; bands that do nothing to push the style forward or stand out with exceptional songwriting and/or markedly high levels of adrenaline (Skeletal Remains is an example of a band that does absolutely nothing new but stands out as great anyway).  I'll give them a little credit for at least not doing the caverncore thing of ripping off Incantation as shamelessly as possible like was popular for a while there, but they fall into a pretty dangerous trap of trying to focus more on mid paced death metal than anything else.  Slow/midpaced extreme metal is incredibly hard to write because you really have no idea if the final product is going to be crushing/groovy/punishing or if it's going to be boring as hell until it's past the point of no return.  You really don't know if you're going to hit the level of Bolt Thrower or Autopsy until it's too late, I reckon.  Creeping Death can't even sniff the britches of Autopsy.  And the blistering fast parts are agonizingly short and spaced out, so you go crazy lengths of time toiling around in meandering chugs waiting for the actually intense parts to start.

Who does this appeal to?  Who has such poor quality control that they can hear such nakedly mediocre death metal and think "yo this fuckin SLAPS"?  Everything about this is bland.  Even the cool parts are stuff I've heard a thousand times before.  They rock when they pick up the pace but man why not just listen to Dismember, ya know?  The title track and "Corroded from Within" are pretty great but the rest of it is just lame.  I can't imagine writing a song as unimaginative as "Consumed" and feeling confident sending it to press.  Maybe I'm just being overly harsh, it is a bit more dynamic than some of their peers, but the classics are classics for a reason and if you're going to take most of your influence from them then please at least do something exciting with them.


RATING: 43%