Wednesday, November 26, 2008
DLA review of Gortuary’s “Manic Thoughts of Perverse Mutilation”
San Diego’s own death metal start-up Gortuary has been tackled by reviewers on the internet’s oldest and most prestigious metal site, the Dark Legions Archive.
Here’s what they have to say about the band’s first release, Manic Thoughts of Perverse Mutilation:
This band reminds me of Psychomancer, who were sort of around a few years ago, but without the ability to grasp the core of what they’re expressing in a song and bring it to light. All instrumentation is capable, songwriting technique is good, but songs don’t come together and end up being a chaotic riff salad of contradictory impulses. That they do this in old school death metal aesthetic is at first memorable, until you realize that this CD lacks what made the old school great: the ability to bring a dark, brooding, powerful vision of life alive and make it exciting. Spare us.
In other words, close, but no cigar: the fragmented, unrelated riffs are this album’s downfall. Perhaps we will see some more noteworthy material from Gortuary in the future?
You can listen to the entire album right here in a modest mp3 quality, but I hope you keep in mind the “try before you buy” philosophy.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Man Destroys Himself - Mexico /San Diego Deathgrind
When it seemed that nearly every single band in the Greater San Diego area was a pile of filth striving to be “BRUTAL” but falling short of anything interesting, I happened upon Man Destroys Himself.
Man Destroys Himself originated in Mexico, and then moved to San Diego. That seems like a horrible idea, from a music-scene standpoint. Nonetheless, they were entirely capable of grasping the fundamentals of metal, drawing influence from bands among the highest ranks of death metal and grindcore, unlike hundreds of metalcore and deathcore clones that infest the area, thereby forging their own brand of deathgrind.
There’s nothing special here insofar as technicality, but they’re fairly skilled. Their vigor reflects itself in their music.
Of particular interest on their Myspace was the track “Macrocosm of Torture”. The music, highly saturated in noise, with drums pounding through with clarity, kept up in pace with the imagery evoked in the lyrics in an ever-changing yet self-similar fashion, matching the intensities of the violent, metaphoric lewd acts described in the lyrics to the music. Vocals are surging in and out where the bass guitar should normally be, but it is hardly missed here.
And then this video here exemplifies how much more awesome their music is. Suck on this, Cannibal Corpse:
Man Destroys Himself - Cloak of Martyr
Man Destroys Himself on Myspace
Album reviews coming soon.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Gortuary
Gortuary hails from San Diego, California, a city which is in desperate need of more decent death metal bands that don’t suck or have venereal diseases. (Although the same could be said about elsewhere too.)
Their first album, Manic Thoughts of Perverse Mutilation (which I still need to get a hold of and give a complete, honest review — meanwhile, this writing shall serve as a prelude) features your cliché BRUTAL DEATH METAL album cover, not unlike the Cannibal Corpse albums.
In fact, this band seems a lot like an homage to Cannibal Corpse, with their minor riff-salad noodling, but with beefed up noise. And being like Cannibal Corpse with more noise is horrible, no matter how many ways you slice it. The noise level makes it so much more difficult to ascertain what part of the song is being played, getting you lost and bored very easily, so I had to record the song off the MySpace, tweak the equalization settings, and listen very closely.
I suppose if you have no clue what death metal is supposed to be, and the noisiness and lack of clarity is TOTALLY AWESOME, then you may find Gortuary appealing, and if so, you really should go back to your Cannibal Corpse and Cradle of Filth.
Ostensibly, the high noise level could be good because it covers up any lack of riff development, as Gortuary seems to have done. The songs seem to be more riff salad and minor variation than anything else. Tying together riffs that are relative to one another has apparently been overlooked by this band, and it’s almost like an epidemic among their contemporaries. The only thing that hooks everything in the song together is that all of the instruments are playing noisily in unison. No solid foundation is ever achieved in their songs, and whenever anything is even close to being established, it’s destroyed while offering about the same satisfaction one would find from stomping on rubble at a demolition site.
Some riffs are fine, some are boring and predictable, but throwing both good and bad riffs together only makes for a messy, mediocre song. They go nowhere, and you may as well be listening to some noise.
As for lyrical themes, I am only able to judge by song titles on their MySpace:
Splatter Fecal Matter
Pedophilic Manipulation
Transgender Dismember
Hereditary Retardation
I’ve seen my fair share of gorier and more “brutal” song titles from early Carcass and Autopsy, who utilized the violent imagery to get their point across (i.e. the world is screwed up to some degree and here’s why), but why are there these types of song titles with no purpose? Especially after Cannibal Corpse kicked off the trend of pointless violent lyrics among the br00tal death metal scene? This just screams “I AM LOUD hipster br000tal death metal with no meaning.”
“Because death metal is about fast guitars, loudness, light-speed drumming, and nothing more.” The sooner you can get this crap out of your head, the sooner you will come to appreciate death metal as an art, and not a token piece of hip irony.
Solution:
Gortuary could be better if they approached their thematic elements from a serious angle instead of “I am here to offend you and shock you for no reason, 20 years after everyone else has already done it.” They should also try pulling some related riffs through a song, and omitting randomly-placed and tangential riffs from it all.
The band members can command their instruments well enough to make something great, and consequently they should be writing and playing something worth their time.
Links:
Official MySpace
Sevared Records
