Disastrous - Slavery of Disgusting Torture

A bit more brutal death from Brute! Prod., this time we have Disastrous, a four-piece from the Philippines. I must say I’ve enjoyed my correspondence with the Brute! label so far, seeing as they’ve turned my ears onto some rather nice stuff that I may have otherwise missed altogether, such as Deathblow, and recordings of bands originating in countries from which you don’t tend to hear brutal death very often (or not nearly as much as from Europe and the States [blimey, what a clumsy sentence!]), like Indonesian outfit Abhorred Despiser, and the band currently being reviewed. However, the back catalogue seems to have been a wee bit hit and miss, what with that not very good Human Filleted one, and, although it does have a few moments, this release is also sadly teetering on a stretched length of thread above the miss pile.

Conventional brutal death metal with all the standard, straight-up sections stacked in similarly structured sequences; balls-out in the middle of the pit type bits heightened with a number of slightly more complex high speed passages, plenty of driving, headnodworthy hooks, heavily tattooed with the regulation pound and clack drum-kit attack, finished with typically inhuman vocal gruffle; whilst it’s definitely common or garden brutal death metal that we’re being subjected to on this release, it does have its moments, which, if you think about it, is one of the key features of common or garden brutal death anyway (standard shite, but has its moments), so I’m telling you stuff you could all probably already guess correctly really.

I’m not going to completely dismiss this disc as a vacuous pile of old shite, because as well as having some nice hooky slam segments and piledriving blast-packed pulverization, they’ve had a couple of good stabs at adding some much more restrained passages into this, to act as a kind of gentle breath of melodic oxygen for your brain, but unfortunately these are limited to the introduction, and a cover version of ‘Desolate Way’ by Morbid Angel. A few more of these, with a bit more thought put into whereabouts they’ve worked them into the arrangements or in between the tracks, would (for me) have worked wonders, especially when they stand in such a stark contrast to the rest of the dirty lurching brutality that’s going on around it. Morbid Angel seems like an unlikely choice for a cover version from such a band as Disastrous, seeing as there are few traces of the works of the older skool death metal of Trey and co elsewhere on the album. A nice addition all the same though.

Beyond these bits though, ‘Disgusting Slavery of Torture’ becomes rather bland, and certainly doesn’t demand more than one listen, perhaps another to give it a chance, but it’s clearly not a ‘grower’. Whilst we’ve heard the content and arrangements more times than any of us could care to remember, I think the triteness of the thing is heavily underlined by the performance and delivery, which seems to lack the powerful bite required to make brutal death like this come across as truly convincing. These lads just seem a bit fed-up, especially the vocalist, who seems bored to tears in the booth with these nondescript slams, squeals and blasts going on all around him. His chalky guttural rattle is very nice (occasionally rising to more of a menacing snarl here and there), but his phrasing and delivery is so limited that the vox are reduced to extremely unimaginative exhalations of long guttural monosyllables, only varying the patterns every so often, blurring the lyrics into ‘eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’. He does do a few ‘eeee-eee-eeees’ and maybe an ‘eee-eee-eee-eeeee’, but these are infrequent! Sometimes featureless, rhythmless vox can work well, but they’re tricky to pull off without sounding, as they do here, shite.

It puts me in mind of some of the less good stuff on Brute!, such as that last Human Filleted release, and the Abhorred Despiser one too, but I think the latter is probably marginally more interesting than this. There’s a similar bland taste to that of their countrymen Down from the Wound, but there are less listless slams littering this release than on ones by those guys. Moving over to where this shite has long been rife, the United States, I think there’s a fair bit of that dull-as-ditchwater Deaden disc Displaying the Art of Carnage, (nothing like the splendid Hymns of the Sick though). A few less inspired Disgorge bits here in there too, maybe a bit of Devourment, some early Brodequin stuff. You get the idea!

Production isn’t much to shout about; murky, fizzy, fuzzy, which only really serves to make the thing seem even more insipid. You don’t have to strain to hear what’s going on or anything like that, but there’s no real vivacity in the sound to speak of really, and I usually prefer a much more oomphatic, lively sound for this kind of thing, so the hooks, no matter how hackneyed, still have a chance of burying themselves into my brain and making me take notice.

Only another small blip on Brute! Productions quality control performance record, I’m sure the signing or release by one of their current artists will be much better. One for the brootal completists only I think.

July 23, 2010

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