I’m usually all for labels signed bands and releasing stuff outside of their usual fare, but Italian deathcore on Napalm Records?
Fail.
It’s not even very good deathcore at that, making Damned to Blindness an even bigger failure.
Sounding like every teenage middle tier American myspace death metal band that’s listened to The Black Dahlia Murder and Cannibal Corpse 3 times, Damned to Blindness in an excess in everything that makes the genre so hated by most fans and a genre that’s slowly becoming the laughing stock of metal, despite some quality acts (Oceano, Whitechapel etc).
It’s not that the combination of squealing blast beats, breakdowns, some melodic slicing and hardcore vocals (to their credit, at least vocalist Giovanni Berselli isn’t a total forced reeeee growler) doesn’t appeal to me, as usually it does, its just that on Damned to Blindness its so cookie cutter and bereft of anything remotely memorable, it simply lacks anything that would make it appealing, even to fan like myself. The whole album sounds like it was processed by some deathcore making machine that simply churns out by the numbers, random combinations of At The Gates, Suffocation, The Black Dahlia Murder and Hatebreed, gives it a clean, sterile production, a scrawly logo, some brutal CG artwork and calls it done.
The thing is, I’m usually a sucker for this stuff, but The Modern Age Slavery simply don’t do anything other than play their instruments well. Beyond the tightness of the playing, hardly a single breakdown got my head moving (“A Desert to Die For” and “Decadence of an Era” were vaguely passable) and not a single blast beat or attempt at a blazing melody line got my blood pumping. In fact, the only things on the album that I enjoyed was the tracks that weren’t typical deathcore; the slow burner “Purple” and the cover of Entombed’s “Wolverine Blues” that closes the album out.
C’mon Napalm Records- I can take occasional outside the box bands like Hurt Locker, Jungle Rot and even The Bulletmonks, but if you are going to releases such a trend hopping attempt to cash in on a genre, at least make it a good one.
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you know if Erik is bashing a deathcore album as being crap then its BAD
on Apr 7th, 2009 at 07:36LOL-ouch.
on Apr 7th, 2009 at 07:36HA HA HA!!
on Apr 7th, 2009 at 08:57Jungle Rot! my old roommate was their bassist for awhile.
on Apr 7th, 2009 at 14:56these motherfuckers covered entombed? why, did they manage to locate more of their older brothers’ albums during the recording process?
on Apr 8th, 2009 at 06:48