It's unfortunate that I'm not the type of guy who listens to this overly-loud psychotic death/grind metal, because I feel that I'm probably missing something that most grindcore and slam-death metal fans would be into.
Dystrophic is the type of band that throws loudness in your face tirelessly for an entire album, with very little range. Their self-titled EP blends chugging blasting with frantic guitar riffs and occassional ambient interludes over an 18-minute period, creating a chunky and unfocused mix of melody and dominating force.
After a 50-second intro featuring sci-fi ambient noises that might remind someone of
Beherit's Drawing
Down the
Moon, the album quickly takes the listener into a pit of white noise via blast beats, faceless wild guitars, and monotonous growls. The drums quickly dominate everything, making it difficult to tell what the guitars are doing unless they play notes on the higher strings. The vocalist is very run-of-the-mill Cookie Monster style, barking and spitting guttural roars into my ear, and over the course of the album I pay him almost no attentoin. If that's the fault of the production or the generic vocal style I don't know, but it's hard to pay much attention to him when the guitars and drums are going. Only rarely does the album break the wall of sound it quickly creates, and that's to put in a gap between each song and to (every once in a while) add a one or two second section where the drums play on their own or the guitar stands out with a real riff. The riffs that can be made out are flashy and sweet, good for a demo effort, but they have no real substance or presence in the music.
There are very few hook moments in this album, and consequently nothing to latch on to or focus attention on in the music. Most of the memorable parts of the album come and go blindingly, with frantic hammer-on riffs and speedy tremolo guitars. It's a little remeniscent of recent
Cannibal Corpse efforts. ...
That is to say, it isn't all that interesting but it has its fair share of standout moments laced here and there in each song. No song is inherently bad here, so I guess you could call the album consistent, but at the same time, no one song shines above the others.
The songs and by extention, the album seem to be plotless and unfocused; the songs leap from one thing to another like a kid with ADHD and none of them are longer than 3-and-a-half minutes, so everything comes at you heavy, hard and fast. There are some times where this works just fine--the guitars deliver speedy, solo-ey riffs as the typewriter drums machine gun their asses off, and it's exciting for a while, but it wears on me a little bit by the end, and considering that this EP is a mere 18 minutes, that's not very good.
It isn't totally boring or totally bad, though. It's just that by the third song or so the blasting formula gets old. There's nothing totally captivating or memorable about this album, and nothing too out there. It's a shame that this album has little to offer musically, because the band defenitely has some skilled people playing. The guitars are technically shocking when they want to be, and they quickly absorb all of my attention every time they come in with a comprehensible riff. But after a while even the guitar highlights become predictable.
The only saving grace from the tiring 'brutal' monotony is the three istrumentals strewn in here: an intro, an outro, and a weird spacey interlude at about the halfway point. These interludes provide nice little breaks from the hammering drums and cookie monster vocals, and since I'm an ambient nut, these quiet moments are actually the highlights for me. I think that the band might want to try expanding on these miniature sonic scapes--maybe even using them in the heavy songs to make everything seem more surreal and spacey. I think the band would benefit from trying to create some sort of atmosphere in their music. I'm not mush into this style of music, as I've said before, so I'm not totally sure if atmosphere is something you can combine with this sorta thing, but it would give the album more resonance with me for sure.
So, this
Dystrophic EP is not bad; in fact it's fairly decent, but I don't feel interested listening to it. Aside from the weird interludes I mentioned above, the only moments that kinda get me going is when the guitars come up in front of the drums and launch into an ultra-fast tremolo riff... something that I can actually hear. I think that this album has a good length considering what's on it, and I do think that there would be many people who would appreciate exactly this type of release. It just so happens that I can only like this sort of thing so much, and I can only take so much of it. I think that those interludes defenitely help me to appreciate the album and are a good way to give the listener some sense of atmosphere while giving them a chance to take a breahter, and they allow me to listen to the rest of the album just fine. My last thing to really say that even though this album is not my kind of metal, it is a solid piece of work and a good start for a band's career.
This album is for those who want face-melting raw-power with little substance or backbone. Either headbang to its ferocious glory or yawn at its noisy monotony.
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