JERKING THE CIRCLE Vol V: Megadeth - Endgame

A Tale of Two Songs

One of the more visible falls from grace in metal history undoubtedly has to be that of Megadeth.  Everybody knows their history, everybody knows the relation to Metallica, everybody knows what I think of them (first five albums are great, Youthanasia is a decent hard rock album, everything else sucks), and everybody for the most part seems to agree.  It's just generally accepted that Megadeth has been shit since at least 1992.  It's really not even worth talking about, because it's all been talked to death.  That's why I'm sitting here, rocking out to Rust in Peace, with a blank document on my computer screen.  God dammit, I love their 1990 album more than almost everything, but it's so hard to review at this point.  Everybody has the same opinion!  Part of me wished they had at least one good album after Countdown to Extinction because then it'd at least make their career somewhat interesting instead of predictable and sad.

But BH!  There is a good album in the last two thirds of their career!  You're completely forgetting about Endgame!

*sigh*

No I'm not.  Endgame sucks, and you're all insane for not realizing it.  Really, this album is just an exercise is the exact kind of subliminal manipulation that Dave spends so much time ironically shouting at the top of his lungs about.  The only thing Endgame does well is order the tracklisting in such a way that you get tricked into thinking it's great.

What do I mean?  Well, ask anybody what their favorite song on this album is.  90% of the time it's "This Day We Fight", the other 10% says "Headcrusher".  There's a reason for this, because they're positioned in such a way, surrounded by exactly the right amounts of boring, half hearted bullshit, that they managed to stand above the crowd.  They're very good songs, the former of which is legitimately probably one of my top ten favorite Megadeth songs.  It's just does everything right, it's the exact kind of violent aggression intertwined with masterful guitar playing that made Rust in Peace such a timeless classic.  It never lets up, it starts with its foot on the gas and just plows through the listeners like zombies in a shopping mall.  The chorus deserves special mention for being so bloody ear catching.  The whole song is a rallying cry, a huge, pissed off anthem to remind everybody why Megadeth is a band worth listening to.  "Headcrusher" is no different, with a pummeling main riff and ferocious vocal patterns that just emanate bile and fire.  It's hard not to pump your fist and bang your head during "DEEEEATH BY THE HEEEEEADCRUSHA".  Both of these songs are exactly what made the band so fucking good in the 80s (yes Rust in Peace is an 80s album, the 80s ended in 1992).

But here's the secret, they're the -only- two good songs on the entire album.  It's so easy to miss because the beginning is so good that you find yourself just riding a high until "Headcrusher" comes in late, but it's true.  You see, Dave, for all the cross eyed tongue waggling lunacy, really can manage to be smart sometimes.  This is an example of his brilliance, because the beginning of the album emulates a previous classic in So Far, So Good, So What?, with "Dialectic Chaos" and "This Day We Fight" perfectly mirroring "Into the Lungs of Hell" and "Set the World Afire".  The intro tracks are both hugely melodic and triumphant sounding shredfests, with only basic riffs being made up for with instantly memorable Van Halen leads and mindbending fretboard theatrics.  The following songs are both big crowd rousing numbers with massive choruses and infectious-yet-punishing riffage.  At this point, after you just sat through albums with such timeless classics as "A Tout le Monde", "Of Mice and Men" and "Moto Psycho", you'll hear that one-two punch of an introduction and promptly pass out due to all of the blood rushing to your reproductive organs.  It's easy to forget that "44 Minutes" is the exact same awkward radio rock bullshit that plagued their 90s era, and it's forgivable to not notice that "Bite the Hand that Feeds" is almost a total rewrite of "Skin O' My Teeth" and "Bodies" is just "Symphony of Destruction" again.  It's okay to immediately erase the embarassingly terrible half-ballad of "The Hardest Part of Letting Go... Sealed with a Kiss" from your memory because just as soon as you start wondering what the fuck it was, "Headcrusher" starts and makes you headbang yourself into a concussive state of amnesia.

That's really what makes up the entire album.  Everything is either a blatant copying of a previous song that people already liked or it's just a new terrible idea that Dave has been unsuccessfully trying so fucking hard to make us like for a decade at the time of release.  I mean let's be real here, who really enjoys the spoken word crap and tinfoil chewing nonsense that Dave spends half of the title track shouting about?  Who really likes the awkward vocal cadences that have plagued the band ever since the early 90s?  Who thought "Captive Honour" was so good that we needed to hear it again with a new title?  I realize that a lot of the copied songs are songs from Countdown to Extinction, an album I openly enjoy the everloving shit out of despite its very obvious flaws.  The difference really comes down to how fresh the songs feel, and Endgame just can't even compare outside of the two obvious songs.  Countdown may have been an obvious attempt at cashing in on Metallica's new direction (and let's not pretend that "This Day We Fight" and "Headcrusher" aren't direct responses to the heavy throwback songs on Death Magnetic, but I really just can't bear to preach that obvious storyline any longer), but it was fun and exciting.  "The Right to Go Insane" just feels like a reheated leftover, and "1,320" sounds like a paint-by-numbers how-to guide in regards to being just mediocre enough to carry the momentum that a previously great track can generate.  Dave's snarl is just as lazy and tired as it has been for nearly two decades, excepting the two I keep namedropping.  In fact, I'm really beginning to suspect that a different, better band actually wrote those two, because holy shit it just makes no sense that he can crap out those two masterpieces in the middle of an album full of rehashed speed rock in the middle of a streak of albums that range from hilariously bad to painfully mediocre.

There are just only so many times I can say the same thing, so I'll wrap it up here.  "This Day We Fight" and "Headcrusher" are two phenomenal songs that absolutely deserve all the praise they've been getting, but the rest of the album contains nothing but bad reimaginings of better songs from their divisive transitional era.  I'm aware that everybody's taste is different, and maybe the majority of people really do just think "1,320" is really just that much better than "High Speed Dirt", but personally I'll never buy it.  Dave got a few things right by recognizing the best tracks and releasing one as a single and the other as the opening song, and also only focusing on politics for about half the songs instead of all of them.  But that's it, everything else is just as bad as they've always been and I feel like I'm the one sober guy staring at the Emperor's naked asshole.


RATING: 40%

JERKING THE CIRCLE Vol IV: Heaven and Hell - The Devil You Know

Yeah I can't think of a title

This is a review I've been both dreading and dying to write.  It's weird to think that this album five years old at this point and I could very well be writing this for people who weren't metal fans when it was released, so if you fall into that category, please make sure you understand: this was the absolute biggest fucking deal in the universe when it dropped in 2009.  Not only was there all the drama surrounding the band's mere name at the time (I saw this lineup twice and still steadfastly refer to them as "Black Sabbath concerts" and I'll never, ever, ever back down from that), but pretty much all four guys in the band had done precisely nothing of note in eons.  This situation would stick most bands under these circumstances as "has beens", and no matter how true that may have been, Dio and Iommi are special.  They're both grandfathers of heavy metal, elder statesmen of an entire genre of music that had grown so much since they were young.  I don't mean to leave Geezer out of the equation since he's a massive part of Sabbath's sound, and believe me when I say that he and Vinny were just as hyped up as the two main men, but the thought of Ronnie James Dio and Tony Iommi collaborating again for the first time in nearly two decades just sent generations of metal fans slipping off their chairs.

And this is where the deification stops from me, and where the inspiration for picking up the Jerking the Circle series again begins.  I'm sorry guys, The Devil You Know is lame and boring.

This is an album that's more... I dunno, inspirational or admirable than actually any good.  See, it was great to see these shambling geriatrics wheelchair themselves on stage and then just rock the fuck out like they were in their 30s again, and it was so refreshing to see that the classic icons of the genre still gave enough of a shit about the music they helped create to continue performing and writing it.  The problem lies in the fact that, barring the flukey Dehumanizer (which in itself is only half great anyway, but I'll explain that in time here), nobody in the band had really made anything worth listening to since the early 80s.  Dio started on an incredible streak, farting out classic albums left and right with Rainbow, Black Sabbath, and his solo band in the 70s and 80s, and Sabbath was phenomenal in the 70s before a slight dip and resurfacing in the early 80s when Dio joined the fold, but after The Mob Rules, they just turned to churning out dull, skippable albums that weird people will swear up and down are among their best (you will never, ever convince me that Tony Martin is better than Dio or that The Headless Cross is better than Sabbath Bloody Sabbath). 

Basically all that history lesson was meant for was to illustrate something that most people never seem to acknowledge; Iommi/Dio hadn't touched anything other than skippable crap for almost 25 solid years before The Devil You Know. So in all honesty, I really shouldn't have been surprised that this album does next to nothing for me.  It's almost 54 minutes long but it feels like it's almost two hours before the album ends.  Most of Tony's good riffs had been used up by The Mob Rules, and no matter how good he was in his prime, this is an everlasting testament to the fact that he's just not as creative or fresh with his songwriting as he used to be.  The album is inspirational in its attitude, but not in its execution, and as a result there are a whopping six plodding snoozefests to start the album off on the worst foot possible.  I can concede that "Bible Black" has a good chorus and the verse riff of "Double the Pain" manages to get the blood moving, and I adore the main riff to "Fear", but that's three riffs across six songs that elicit any emotion out of me other than overwhelming apathy.  That's a frickin' terrible batting average.  It's sort of like Sammy Sosa coming out of retirement and leading the league in strikeouts while everybody showers him in awards and adulation because once upon a time he was super good and now here he is doing that thing again (let's just pretend the cork and the steroids never happened for the sake of argument, I'm not good at baseball dammit).

I think the biggest problem stems from the fact that the album's single focus is skull squeezing heaviness, which it does admittedly achieve to an extent with an absolutely monstrous guitar tone, but it's overall ineffective because the riffs just never go anywhere.  It's so clearly the result of four old men gathering around and trying to be all wise and weathered and whatever other positive synonyms you can think of for "so old you can see through their skin", and it just comes off like there's no vigor anywhere to be found.  Like 85% of the album lumbers around at this leisurely lurch, like an ice giant out for a stroll.  There's so little energy here, songs like "Breaking Into Heaven" and "Rock and Roll Angel" meander around for upwards of seventy six minutes with no fire or passion behind them.  Almost the entire album is full of these dull chugging exercises that have to be unbelievably boring to play on stage.  I know what they're going for, this is supposed to be pure, oppressive doom metal, full of apocalyptic dread and bone shattering crunch, and I suppose they achieve that if you really think about it.

The problem with that is that that's not what Dio does.  Absolutely not, Dio has always been at his best when he's carrying a sense of wonder and grandeur.  Really, think of all the best songs he ever sang on.  "Man on the Silver Mountain", "Die Young", "Falling Off the Edge of the World", "The Last in Line", "Rainbow in the Dark", fuckin' "Stargazer", "Kill the King".  All of those songs have one thing in common, they feel like they're showing you something greater than yourself.  They all have this indescribable sense of magic surrounding them, and they're all  just these huge sounding songs with an almost childlike sense of wonder.  Precisely zero of the best Dio songs (barring the exception in "Heaven and Hell" (and I guess "Sign of the Southern Cross" is really popular too but personally it bores me) are slow and doomy.  None of them feel like a hungover titan sleepily pawing at his alarm clock like "Atom and Evil" does.  Dio doesn't do doom, and that's why the heavier Dio albums suck and the best song on Dehumanizer is "TV Crimes".  You know, the fast one.  He's woefully miscast in this role simply because he's essentially this ancient wizard at this point in time, but his voice was still as powerful as it was during his classic era.  He didn't need to tone down his performance, but the rest of the band did, and so Dio's always immaculate voice rides dull melodies over boring, go-nowhere plod riffs.

That's not to say the whole album is bad, it's just fundamentally flawed.  There are two uptempo songs to be found in "Eating the Cannibals" and "Neverwhere", and unsurprisingly they're the best songs on the album by a long shot.  That's what Dio does best, he requires some semblance of energy behind him in order for him to reach his full potential.  "Bible Black" may be heavy and dark, but it's not energetic, and that's why the vocals fall flat when put into the whole unit.  It's so sad to say but really every member of the band brings largely an inconsequential performance to the table.  Vinny Appice plays the most standard timekeeping beats imaginable with almost no fills to speak of, Geezer has very few of his famous runs (oddly enough, the two do get some brief moments of entertaining  showboating in the background during "Bible Black" and essentially nowhere else), Iommi pens a whopping seven or eight good riffs across ten songs, and Dio stands out purely because his voice is so recognizable.  If there was a different personnel behind this album, I feel like the metal fandom as a whole would give less than a single shit about it.  The songs themselves have moments of past brilliance scattered here and there but for the most part they're devoid of enjoyment, replaced instead with an abundance of fillery non-riffs that go nowhere.

Maybe I'm wrong for wishing this album is something that it wasn't, but to be fair, isn't that the reason we don't like... well, anything?  How many times are you caught telling yourself "Well this album does exactly what I want it to do, it ticks all the boxes, buuuuuut it's lame"?  Never.  That's why the only songs worth listening to are "Eating the Cannibals" and "Neverwhere" for the heightened pace and thus thicker groove, and "Bible Black" for just being the only song to really get the formula they're going for right.  I still recommend listening to it because it's a curious little oddity at the tail end of a couple legendary careers, and the swansong of one of metal's greatest faces, and also because everybody but me seems to love it so chances are you will too.  For me?  It just reinforces my belief that Dio/Iommi/Geezer all have about thirty solid years of forgettable crap going on right now as long as you grant an exception to Dehumanizer. 


RATING: 29%

JERKING THE CIRCLE Vol III: Gorguts - Obscura

 I feel like I'm taking crazy pills...

For real, Obscura is the album that inspired this entire series in the first place.  The reason for this is simple; as far as I've been able to tell, there is no other album in all of heavy metal that is both as well loved by the fandom and also as intensely reviled by me.  I can understand near-universal worship of bands and albums I dislike most of the time, I really can.  Hell, I rag on Helloween's most notable work all the time, but I know why people like it.  I understand how and why it was so influential, even to bands that I enjoy.  I get it, I really do.  But for the life of me, Obscura still eludes me.  What the fuck is it that makes this so goddamn revered?  I really can't wrap my head around it.  The only way I can rationalize it is by viewing it from the "I love weird things for the sake of weird things" crowd, but even then I still see this hailed by both old school death metal fanatics and snobby prog fans alike.  Something about Gorguts's third album brings everybody together, and I'm not even exaggerating when I say I've spent roughly eight years listening to this album on and off trying to make sense of it all, and I just cannot for the life of me understand the appeal in this sonic trainwreck. 

Some people are just suckers for dissonance, I can get that, it's why shit like Portal and Ulcerate are so popular in the underground.  Hell, I'm a huge fan of SikTh and they're pretty notorious for sounding terrible on purpose since the guitarists don't know a lick of music theory and just kind of play whatever.  But Gorguts here manages to be dissonant 100% of the time, there isn't one consonant chord or melody throughout the entire bloated runtime of Obscura.  I'm as serious as a goddamned heart attack right now, for real.  This manages to run over an hour without anything pleasing to the ear happening.

But BH!  It's death metal!  You can't expect death metal to be pleasing to the ear!  I bet you're an In Flames fan!

Clearly I mean pleasing in a death metal sense.  I like listening to Cannibal Corpse, I enjoy rocking out to Immolation, I could spin the first Krisiun album day and night, I have honestly nearly shat my pants during "Suspended in Tribulation" during a Suffocation show, I enjoy all of these classic bands not because they're melodic or pleasant, but because they don't sound like they just picked up their instruments for the first time the day prior to entering the studio.  I don't give a fuck how "creative" or "avant garde" or "outside the box" this album is, the bottom line is that the opening riff to the title track sounds fucking terrible.  That's not even first year guitar player level of skill, that's not even first day.  That is somebody picking up their buddy's guitar when he leaves the room for a second and just wailing away on it without having a clue what he's doing.  Every last riff sounds like this, they all sound like dissonant smashing and random bends with no real thought put behind them other than "Does this sound like shit?  Yeah?  Perfect!".  The percussion section is equally nonsensical; complementing nothing by blasting at seemingly inopportune times, goofing around with bizarre jazz sensibilites, and just seemingly playing the entire album as a free time jazz exercise as opposed to anything even remotely structured.

And you know what?  Maybe that's the real problem I have with the album.  Maybe it's my distaste of intentionally structureless jazz that draws me away from it.  Let me ponder that for a bit...

Oh, no wait, my mistake, that's absolute bullshit.  It's not just the fact that the structure is bizarre or jazzy, it's that it isn't there at all, and as a result nothing sticks with you other than "Clouded", and that's solely because it stands out for being much slower than the rest of the album and a whopping ten goddamn minutes long.  The songs all waft in and out of consciousness between epileptic fits of chaotic nonsense, noodling around with strange, dissonant wonkiness and grating harmonics for the better part of an hour, boring itself into your skull like an iron mosquito (note to self: pitch Iron Mosquito to Capcom for new Mega Man X game).  Other than that one track, nothing else is memorable for any reason other than the fact that it sounds like a chalkboard grinding its teeth.  This is seriously the most irritating music I've ever listened to, and this is taking into account shit like Neoandertals, Enmity, and that one random Buckethead impression that my buddy recorded that I post all the time.  I listen to albums while I review them, and this has taken me a month to write this far simply because Obscura gives me such a cataclysmic headache.  I know that saying any particular piece of music is "random" or "has no structure at all" and things of that sort almost always implies that the reviewer doesn't know what he/she's talking about and just can't fathom something unconventional, and I know how silly I must sound saying those same things about this album.  Obviously it isn't random, Gorguts can perform these songs live, they were very deliberately written, but they suuuuuuuck.

Another thing I really need to get across is Luc Lemay's vocals.  They are just... oh man, otherworldly bad.  Strangely enough, on one hand, I feel like they fit the music perfectly, as they're really tortured and chaotic sounding, like there's absolutely no skill as a death metal vocalist present and he's just yelling at the top of his lungs.  I'm not just saying that because I feel like there's zero skill involved in the instrumentals either (though that does also apply), but I feel like this style could work if the music was better, because it fits with the chaotic dissonance that the music revels in.  Agonized howling like this works well with certain torture doom bands like Senthil who go for a similar atmosphere, but with an album so chock full of irritation like this, it's merely another pin in my back.  It's all so non-stop and abrasive, and it works in all the wrong ways.  He howls like a guy making fun of death metal, and the guitars just hammer away and impossibly dissonant and wretched sounding chords and seemingly randomly placed harmonic squeals, and the drums sound like they're being performed by an eight year old who is just having the time of his life hitting everything he can.  This is a death metal version of The Shaggs, it sounds like a parody, and I will never understand how it attained such cult status for its "avant garde genius".

Honestly, Obscura will forever blow my mind.  This must be how death metal sounds to people who hate death metal.  And hell, even if I look at it from a different perspective, it doesn't help it.  Let's not view it as death metal, but instead prog metal or avant garde, either way it sounds like crap.  The music sounds bad, the guitars sound like a first grader just strumming and sliding his fingers up and down the neck, and the vocals are almost hilariously inept.  This bewilders me because I've actually since gone back and listened to some of the band's older material (which I'd avoided for years because this album pisses me off so much), and they're a perfectly capable band.  It's not like they're a bunch of Wesley Willis types that people latch on to for novelty (or just because they're so passionate about what they do that it's hard not to like), nor are they something like the aforementioned Shaggs or Complete where they are so transcendentally inept that they get dug up years later and passed around the internet for shiggles.  They wrote some solid death metal back in the day, and then around 1998 apparently decided to go a different direction.  That direction was downwards. 

Part of me can almost appreciate what Gorguts is going for here, I can tell they're trying to do something very different, they're trying to be much more dissonant than anything before them.  They're going for some kind of weird, avant garde style insanity.  Hell, maybe they're trying to tap into the musical representation of insanity itself.  It's possible, but it doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day, the product presented to us sounds like absolute horsedick.  There is not one single aspect of Obscura that I can give praise to.  It's a haphazard mess of seemingly intentionally irritating parts thrown together with apparently no regard for the interconnecting parts nor the big picture.  The high pitched slides and squeals contrast with the dissonant banging in the same way a knifewound to the gut contrasts with a hatchet to the cranium.  The vocals are one dimensional yowls and shrieks and simply add another layer of needless frustration onto an already compounded pile of headache fuel.  How this ever became a cult classic is beyond me, because it sound like if I had just picked up instruments I'd never played before and wailed on them without any real idea how they worked.  And it's weird because it's deliberate.  It sounds like cacophonous shit on purpose, and that somehow makes it a brilliant masterpiece.

I didn't expect to give this a zero when I started writing, I really didn't.  I expected a single digit score, yes, but not a zero.  The more I listened, the worse it got.  It just gets more irritating with repeated listens, and the layers peel away not to reveal hidden genius, but simply different frequencies of irritation I hadn't noticed before.  There's nothing here to like, this is the absolute nadir of musicality.  I don't care how expertly this was written, I don't care how deliberate and complex it is.  Frankly, it sounds awful, goes on for far too long, and has nothing enjoyable to be found.  You want weird, late 90s death metal?  Listen to Starseed, otherwise hop off this album's dick and stop trying to find beauty inside the asshole of Shub Niggurath.


RATING - 0%

JERKING THE CIRCLE Vol II: Death - Individual Thought Patterns

Crushed under its own weight

What time is it?!  Time for another installment of Jerking the Circle!  Yes kids, the series wherein I take a look at albums that get tons and tons of praise from certain groups within the metal community (or just the community at large).  Today we look at a band that released some stunningly great albums, and instead focus on what is by far their worst one.  Goddammit Chuck, remove your head from your anus, por favor.

Death had a moderately lengthy and quite illustrious career, spanning seven albums of wildly varying sounds and an even more unpredictable lineup.  And this, Individual Thought Patterns marks both their lowest point as a band, and also (bafflingly) their most star studded lineup.  Death has always basically been Chuck Schuldiner's Revolving Band Selected Via Musical Chairs Matches, and in 1993 he managed to strike potential gold by retaining the fretless hobo of Sadus fame, Steve DiGiorgio, and bailing on the technically proficient but writing impaired hacks from Cynic and replaced them with goddamn Andy LaRocque (known for King Diamond), and motherfucking Gene Hoglan (known for every fucking band ever).  Seriously, you ever play that game where you daydream up the ultimate band?  Chuck Schuldiner fucking did that, and whatever personality issues the man had that caused members to leave constantly/him to constantly kick them out, I really wished he would have found a way to rein it in around this era, because there is so much star power potential in here I could go blind by looking at it.

And then I actually heard the album.

Yeah, I guess stars are prone to supernovas, because this is an unmitigated disaster.  Don't get me wrong, despite my general distaste for prog, I don't dislike the fact that Chuck decided to take the band in a more progressive direction (they were pretty much devoid of death metal from this point onwards).  Hell Symbolic is probably my favorite album by the band, just a smidgeon above Leprosy.  But this here is a goddamn trainwreck.  This is what happens when somebody who's good at being hard and fast and heavy decides that that path is too stupid and instead tries to be more intellectual about everything.  And hey, to his credit, he did eventually figure it out, because Symbolic is great, but Chuck didn't have a goddamn idea what he was doing when writing this album.  Listening to this in one sitting, I'd be hard pressed to tell you where each song ends and a new one begins, much less which song is even actually playing, even after a decade of being a Death fan. 

There are moments of brilliance scattered throughout, as "Destiny" has a fantastic riff hidden somewhere in the middle, as does "Nothing is Everything" and "Overactive Imagination", but that's really all I can do for critique; pick out random bits from random songs and tell you whether it's good or bad.  It's woefully unprofessional, and I get that, but it really feels like the album was written and recorded in that same haphazard direction.  Lots of shit happens, but I don't think anybody other than Chuck himself actually knew why.  This is probably the most literal collection of riffs and ideas I've ever heard.  Very few sections repeat later in a song, it's basically just a 40 minute gag reel of jazzy proto-tech-prog ideas that the band was noodling around with but couldn't really decide on how to arrange.  So they just decided to play them all in one long 40 minute take, arbitrarily consider it a new track every four minutes or so, and call it a day.  It's a shame because the talent is obviously there, but at this point Chuck was no longer in a transition phase, and therefore had neither that excuse nor the leftover bits of pummeling death metal morbidity that he had on Human.  Individual Thought Patterns is instead it's own entity with no crutch to lean on, which is unfortunate because it's rather malformed and disabled.

There was also a quite bizarre malady that plagued the band during this middle era as well, and that was that the more technical, proggy, and wanky the music got, the shorter the average song was.  The average song lengths on both Human and Individual Thought Patterns are shorter than their more simplistic predecessors in Leprosy and Spiritual Healing.  This kind of writing (when not done in such a slapdash and poorly arranged manner) definitely lends itself to a more spaced out format.  I normally prefer shorter songs, mind you (one of the reasons Gama Bomb will always be better than Cyclone Temple), but nothing here has room to breathe or develop.  Instead we're presented with ten claustrophobic and rushed exercises in vaguely deathy progjazz.  Again, the entire album is presented as a collection of unrelated things, and that's basically the end of it right there where it starts.

The production job is also a nagging whack in the shins, as like with the previous album, it's rather thin and lacks the punch of their earlier recordings.  We've all heard Leprosy, we understand how good they can sound.  The guitar tone on that album was as thick as a baby's arm, and yet here it's this wispy gossamer.  I realize they were going for more precision and less chunk, but the music is noticeably less powerful this time around and it suffers for it.  The widdly wanky parts are well suited to this kind of sound, I'll admit, but there are occasions when real riffs and double bass and whatnot actually do happen, and they end up laughably weak in the grand scheme of things.  "Weak" is an adjective that applies only to this album throughout all of Death's discography, and that's a giant mark against it.

Overall this is too jazzy and not thought out enough for it's own good.  There are far too many segments where the instruments all just kind of break down into their own thing and all wander away from each other.  The percussion is definitely prone to this, with Hoglan being wildly misused and left to just mostly fuck around with bizarre cymbal patterns.  When Chuck reined it in on the following two albums and focused more on cohesive songwriting and logical progression, they knocked it out of the park.  But here?  Not at all, not yet.  The kinda awkward but still good transition phase in Human had long passed, and they were fully into the prog territory at this point, but frankly, the songwriter here still wasn't entirely sure of himself, and as a result Individual Thought Patterns is a complete mess, and probably the only skippable album in Death's entire career.

RATING - 38%

JERKING THE CIRCLE Vol I: Beyond Creation - The Aura

Featuring the adults from Peanuts on bass guitar!

Welcome to Jerking the Circle!  A new series wherein I tackle seemingly universally well loved albums that I can't help but feel actually kinda suck.  Today I shall steel myself against the waves of vitriolic nationalist scorn, as I'm here to point out to everybody that the latest Quebecnichal band that's apparently taken the metal fandom by storm, Beyond Creation, is actually not all that good or interesting.

A few quick things right off the bat; yes, I used to sing this album's praises back in early 2011 when it first dropped.  The things I said about it back then are still true to an extent, but with time the album really grows away from you, as the poorly thought out compositions, excessive noodliness, and just overall shoddy execution really begins to grate on one's ears.  Secondly, yes, the bassist from Augury is stunningly talented, and his fretless tones really help give the album an identity.  Unfortunately, for all the band member's skill, none of them can put their ideas together in an enjoyable fashion.  The Aura is basically a 52 minute blur of faceless technicality and wrrrow WRRROW sounding basslines.

And yet, that seems to be the main draw of the band.  On the few occasions where I can break my head above the overwhelming flood of ejaculate and catch my breath, I hear praise that champions the band's outside-the-box approach, heavy melody, and that ever prevalent fretless bass.  All of this stuff is true, the bass is above even DD Verni in the "look at me! I'm important!" department, there is an absolute abundance of melody, and the songwriting is very... erm, "progressive".  Upon my first listen to this, I was reminded of fellow Francophone Habs fanatics, Neuraxis, but that comparison doesn't really stick outside of the first song and a couple occasional sections here and there (like in "Le Detenteur").  I like Neuraxis because they're basically just really, really fast death metal, complete with real riffs played at blinding speed.  Beyond Creation here is, more often than not, true to the common criticism of being a group of dudes just playing a bunch of stuff.  Just that.  Stuff.  That's what The Aura is.  It's just a bunch of... stuff.

It's hard to point out specific sections because there are so many different things happening that all somehow manage to sound the same.  There are a couple traditional breakdowns scattered about (like in "Coexistence", "Injustice Revealed", and the 11 minute failed epic, "The Deported"), some more tripped out, proggy moments, the really cool Neuraxis styled riff batteries, and absolutely incessant "wrow wrow" bass.  Seriously, it permeates through every single moment, regardless of what the rest of the band is doing, and it's more distracting than anything.  Maybe it's like King Diamond where his voice is annoying to some people but absolutely integral to both Mercyful Fate and his solo band to others, but here I just can't get behind it.  Steve DiGiorgio plays a fretless bass too but he doesn't stand in front of your face and just woobly wrow wrow in your face for a whole goddamn Sadus album.  That dude from Hibria gets crap for playing too many notes as well, but man he reins it in for most of the songs and just decides to showcase the fact that he has thirteen fingers every once in a while, he isn't desperately trying to push the guitarists out of his way at every opportunity.  No I cannot let this go.  It's so fucking distracting, I forget what most of the album sounds like because I just keep remembering the modulated moose bellows every goddamn bar.  Seriously, stop it, Jaco, before I sic a kung fu superbouncer on you.

Forcing your way past the excessively irritating moan of the bass can be a challenge, but if you can somehow manage it, you'll find that the rest of the songs really aren't all that interesting.  They get a lot of kudos for being proggy, but apart from the occasional tripped out and atmospheric interlude, I'm not entirely sure why.  I don't mean to imply that I'm devaluing this for being pretty standard, but apart from the lengthy runtimes, yeah The Aura is pretty standard.  Yeah yeah it doesn't follow the traditional verse-chorus-yakkity-yak template, but you know who else doesn't?  Almost every other death metal band on the planet.  Unconventional structuring is pretty much the convention in death metal, and the mere fact that Beyond Creation tends to use more sections per song than most doesn't inherently make them any more progressive or advanced than Cannibal Corpse.  But even with the nomenclature dispute aside, nothing here manages to stick.  It's odd because they do a lot of different stuff, but it's all thrown together in a really slapdash style.  "The Deported" is a great example, because it kind of wanders in and out between high tempo breakdowns and slow, jazzy solo sections throughout the entire eleven minute runtime, and it manages to do so with only one coherent transition.  And even if it was more cohesive and tied together by an idea more complex than "tapping sections, weird off-time jazz percussion, and BASS BASS BAAAAASS", it wouldn't really matter because the individual sections of each song are pretty dull themselves.  The entire album just kinda happens without much consequence.  No particular part will grab you due to a very well done riff, or great solo section, or memorable melody, or strong climax, or pretty much anything.  This album plateaus from the start and never gets more or less interesting as it goes on. 

So yeah, The Aura is a collection of well performed but utterly uninteresting tech death pieces that wouldn't stand out in the slightest if it weren't for that motherfucking bass.  I get it though, I really do.  I understand that they're playing to their strengths because the man is a very proficient bass player, the issue is that none of the members can count "songwriting" as one of their strengths.  Beyond Creation is like that one dude who has incredible puck handling skills and can make crazy trick shots in a shootout situation, but the instant you put him on a team you realize he can't pass and has no idea how to handle defense and causes a bunch of turnovers.  There really isn't a whole lot I can recommend other than showy instrumentals, and that really doesn't make for a worthwhile album on the whole.


RATING - 30%