In our ongoing investigation of deceptive and outright fraudulent extreme metal acts, we pull the rug under a handful of established outfits that don’t even seem to bother hiding that they are after your money first, artistic integrity a distant second - an audience satisfaction not even registering. The more we pull away the blinds the more obvious these practices become. Maybe your favorite band is in here, maybe your life-long inspiration only cares about the dollars/euros you’re giving him/her? Don’t be fooled, there are plenty of honest, hard-working metal bands everywhere in the scene. It’s just that these money-hungry, artistically vacuum units make it difficult for everybody involved. These bands stopped caring, they lost the passion and fire. In short: they Sold Their Souls...
I had some material done already before the demise of Lord Belial. Some of the material was actually intended for the next Lord Belial album, but since we disbanded I changed around all of the ideas into new songs.
I don’t really consider it that much superior. But we KEPT the quality from 1st to 4th album, and that is something that is not easy to do! And I think there will come a 5th album that will kick just as much ass.
You’d imagine that the combination of industrial and death metal would be far more prominently explored and established by now. Both genres draw their strength from feelings of alienation, claustrophobia, isolation and general misanthropy. Yet few bands actually manage to make both genres sound coherent in unison. So, here’s Deathstench, an American duo attempting to do just that. The industrial segments of this album are more than tolerable, good even. It’s the death/black metal parts which are uniformly weak. It’s hard to believe that Mysticum laid out the groundwork in 1996 with their "In the Streams Of Inferno" album, yet nobody is apparently able to work further upon those building blocks. Emptiness has even managed to get the basic gist right, and that was in the early 2000s. The death metal seems to draw a lot from Incantation, which is a plus - but all other aspects are quite poorly conceived, or executed. The absolutely terrible, garage-level production is partly to blame for this. Not even expensive outside gloss is able to mask that. The mastering job by Billy Anderson (Brutal Truth, Crisis, Eyehategod, High On Fire, Neurosis) is truly wasted on otherwise commendable idea. The artwork is of the Mark Riddick, Chris Moyen variety and quite accomplished at that. "Massed In Black Shadow" isn’t bad, it is steeped with underachievement and conceptual shortchanging. I like the central idea and conceptual themes in this music and of this album, a lot even. It’s just all so incoherent, and a ton of interesting finds are not explored enough, or merely hinted at. Stop doing that, seriously. I get the feeling that this album could have been so much more. So much more engaging, so much more deep, so many layers left untapped. It’s a shame, really - because Deathstench are onto something here. Time will tell whether they will reach their full potential.http://www.malignantrecords.comcomment itWouter 5
