Liste der Bands Brutal Death Common Grave (GER) Embedded Coding

Common Grave's third effort came out a few weeks ago and it took me some time to get to it. I'll spare you the technical issues that made most of the difficulties of reaching the record to get into more of the musical issues.

There are countless Death Metal bands out there so you will excuse me if I didn't get to know better Common Grave's discography before I got to “Embedded Coding”. First of all, let's get something out of the way. Out of the two bands named Common Grave, only the German one, this one, plays Death Metal.

“Embedded Coding” is their third full-length [ times flies, doesn't it?] and I'd suppose they may achieve some maturity since their first release back in 2001. Necrophagist's Stefan Fimmers goes behind the desk and delivers production that is... well reminiscent of Necrophagist. Note that Fimmers also played up till 2004 in another German band named Human Bloodfeast, whose lineup shows some strange similarities to Common Grave. Well they said it was 'Common', nothing surprising. It's a small world after all (please refrain from singing).

Musically, Common Grave is a bit intriguing. That is the least one might say about the bands. “Embedded Coding” starts off with an intro a la Prodigy displaying some nice electro synths. Well, yeah I wrote nice because I mean it. Remember the cheesy “keyboards” in Pungent Stench's Psychotronic Beats? Yeah, it was a joke and it sucked big time. At least here the guys know what they're doing.

Funny intro though considering what comes next. I was thinking this was some Monolith Deathcult kind of band. Neh, here it's plain technical metal. Quite surprisingly the construction of the record is a bit unsettling. The 'first' part is divided in the middle by yet another electrometal interlude which would be fitting on vinyl but does sound totally out of fucking space on a CD (not to mention anything about streaming... erm...). After that second interlude comes the second and last part which will end with the discopolo outro (yeah, I'm that good, hehe).

So what? Nothing surprising? That's it? Sure, I could mention that Dying Fetus' Galagher or Desgagnes' Beneath The Massacre are in it for some tracks giving some color to the otherwise rather 'Common' (well they chose the name, not me) pair of growly-squealy-vox and screechy-high-pitched-a-la-BM-but-not-quite-vox. I could also mention some of the worst annoying drum triggers out there I've listened to recently (I mean if you're going to use triggers that much, you could save some money and do some drum programming instead... just my two cents).

Hmm. Doesn't sound too good, does it? Well, that's what I thought until you get to the second part of the record. Those three last tracks, namely “Degradation Upgrade”, “Body Art” and “Earmageddon” seem to have been composed by an entirely different band. The first tracks are just as bland as most of what comes out nowadays of Death Metal standardized factories like Unique Leader or Willowtip. Tasteless, formatted (did Fimmers think that Necrophagizing the band would do it any good?) and most of all generic, these tracks are fodder. Oh well, yeah, they're technical... Well too bad I don't give much more than a monkey shit about that because I also like some sweat and spirit in my Death Metal. And I didn't find it there.


However I did find it in these three tracks. The three closing tracks. I suppose it's not an “accident”. I suppose that some guy thought it'd be better to surf on Necrophagist's wave of successes rather than dare put forward tracks that had their own stuff to them and not some cloning skills.

Which all in all isn't that bad if you look on the bright side. You get two EP's for the price of one CD. Technicalities' lovers will play on and on the first “side” (sic) of the record and skip the rest to oblivion where others more like me who like bones and flesh to their music will scratch the first half of the CD to get directly on good tracks. You might even be the kind that enjoys both generic stuff and more original stuff too, so you'd fit nicely in that “Common Grave”.