Deathstench
Massed In Black Shadow ()
Wydane przez Malignant Records/Black Plague ProductionsRok wydania Kraj USANapisał Wouter5
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.
www.malignantrecords.com
