Language: English
Genre: Death Metal
.FLAC via Mega (Link)
.AAC 256 kbps via Mega (Link)
© 2011 Mascot Records
Review by "MW" for Heavy Blog Is Heavy.com
Pestilence were once among the giants in the early death metal scene. The release of their albums Malleus Maleficarum and Consuming Impulse shaped
the sound of death metal as we know it. These two albums featured the
legendary god of the growl, Martin Van Drunen on vocals. But, bands
change. Pestilence soon became much more of a progressive outfit
influenced by Cynic, where bassist Jeroen Paul Thesseling now of Obscura fame got his start on the album Spheres back in in ’93 after the release of Testimony of the Ancients (which featured Tony Choy on bass!). They soon broke up, and reformed in 2008 to release Resurrection Macabre. Soon after Resurrection Macabre we have this, the new album Doctrine.
Their previous
effort really wasn’t to my liking, so I was wary to give this a spin
and for good reason. The album starts with your average sampled,
half-ass attempt at being atmospheric that every death metal band ever
has tried. Nothing to worry about yet, just a couple seconds until the
album actually starts. Although, I wish it hadn’t. Old bands lose their
shine after a while, and that’s to be expected.
The first real song opens up with some
super muddy eight-string riffing and average drums. I had no idea there
would be eight-string use on this album, so it was a neat surprise. When
I say the guitars are muddy, I mean super muddy. The tone is
really bad and it’s kind of hard to make things out. It’s not good death
doom or sludge muddy either; it’s just bad production. The riffs feel
really silly and odd. They have a nice groove to them occasionally, but
overall it feels weak and sloppily put together. When the vocals come in
I burst out laughing. It’s hard to describe how bad that first scream
is. I’m really having a hard time trying to word what I want to say
about this. The vocals sound like a drunken chain smoker with strep
throat trying to cover MVD songs on death metal karaoke night.
The album continues on in a similar fashion
almost all the way through. Disjointed half wanky klonk-a-donk
eight-string riffs are thrown together over sub-par, over-produced,
clacky drums that do nothing but exist. Every once in a while you get
the increasingly abundant shitty fusion jazz solo that’s starting to
oversaturate itself in metal. There isn’t a single point where the
vocals get better, nor the guitars.
The one thing that stands out on this
album, almost giving it a glimmer of hope, is the bass. The
aforementioned Jeroen Paul Thesseling returns with his brilliant
fretless six-string skills to tear shit up. He easily doubles the
guitar, or lays down some original rhythm when he feels like it. The
track “Deception” even has a cool bass solo from him, so that’s neat.
There’s not much else I can say about this
album. It’s horribly written, the production is insanely bad and
everything feels like it was put together within a couple days. I’m
truly at a loss for words here. This is like the Atheist
comeback fiasco, only the new Atheist was a Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and
this is a non-Hodgkin’s sort and has already begun to infect your other
major organs multiplying the shit level more than ten fold. Good lord,
what has happened.
tags: pestilence, doctrine, 2011, flac,
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