| Reviews for Livercage's Impaled and Forgotten |
| So bizarre, yet so awesome - 90% |
| Written by OakenHelm
on May 30th, 2008
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| This is one of the most deranged and filthy albums I have ever heard. Livercage are a sort of black metal/industrial hybrid, but this isn't friendly music in the least. The corrosion and mechanical brutality of the most extreme industrial has been spliced with the hatred and ugliness of black metal, creating a truly disturbing album. This doesn't even sound like music; it's pure hate in audio form. Cliche as that is, it's pretty true. There are occasionally discernable, sort of melodic riffs here and there in some tracks, while others are virtually nothing but hostile white noise and the distorted beyond belief vocals. Atmospherically, however, this album is astounding. The pure, cold inhumanity of it all is staggering. Describing the music is actually fairly difficult because first of all there is so much going on within each track, and secondly, most of the focus is more on how horrific this all is rather than anything musical about it. The only real constant in any of this would be that the vocals are completely indecipherable and swamped with so many effects as to sound nothing like what any human could possibly begin to utter. I'd thought I'd heard the limits of how far metal could be taken before this; I was wrong. Make no mistake, this isn't the bouncy industrial most of us are used to hearing in our metal; it is lifeless, unfeeling and abrasive. It's almost noise by this standard. Isolating individual tracks is meaningless; this is meant to be a single, hour plus bludgeoning of despair and hate. Even the pseudo-melodic parts, which are few and far between, are not so much a respite as a lull in the violence. This is definitely up there with the weirdest albums I own, but also one of the best. Livercage are very, very unique, and maintain an astounding amount of variety in each of their songs. The closest band I can think of for comparison is WOLD, but neither band is really similar; both just share the same cold, harsh fusion of black metal and extreme industrial, and both are undeniably apocalyptic. This is the soundtrack to the end of humanity by machines. There is no light, and there is no escape. Brilliant. |
| Do not fuck with Livercage - 90% |
| Written by Muloc7253
on May 24th, 2008
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| This is some seriously fierce metal right here. No kidding, Livercage play a hellishly brilliant mix of industrial and black metal, resulting in atrosiously violent and hateful militaristic industrial with evil, demanding vocals. It sounds like a satanic cyborg nazi trying to free the world of all human scum. Intrigued? I should hope so. The songs are made up of cold, clockwork drumming normally at a mid-paced speed, accompanied by heavy, dark mechanical riffing and deranged, frantic vocals. There are other elements to the composition too though, which seem to be half of what makes this so great. Suddenly, we'll be treated (or mistreated, if you don't like violent music) to some robotic vocals, or harsh electronic sounds or any other assortment strange, alien events that happen at different point throughout this recording, invading our homes and our minds. Overall, as just a general metal album, this is very solid. Diverse enough to stay interesting and packing enough good riffs to keep the headbanger in all of us happy. But there is more to it than that, this is much more artistic than just a regular metal album. Throughout the whole painful journey that is 'Impaled and Forgotten', we are taken to many different environments and events from different periods of fictional time. How this album manages to tell such a terrific (or horrific) story of horror, sci-fi and psychodrama without the use of any (comprehensible) words is beyond me, and takes Livercage from being a regular noisey extreme metal band to being creative geniuses, through their ingenius use of soundscapes and emotion. This album will take you on a trip to post-apocalyptical hell, like some deranged cross between Apocalypse Now and The Call of Cthulhu. If you're looking for just a solid piece of black industrial, then sure you'll find it, but there are plenty of other good black industrial bands. However, if you're looking for something a little more creative and captivating, then there are none better than the mighty Livercage. |
| Noizemongers for UFOserpent - 83% |
| Written by Noktorn
on September 18th, 2007
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| This is some ugly fucking music, even by my standards. This is another band that I would characterize as 'black industrial'; not Aborym or Dødheimsgard or whatever, but in the style of a band like Roadkill Sodomizer, where the heavy metal is eliminated, only leaving the music with both the essence of black metal and industrial in its wake. This is not music based off steady rivethead beats or staggered 32nd note riffing. It's not very musical at all. The most 'melodic' moments are like those at the beginning of 'Bleeding Beneath The Sky Of Falling Snow', where the morass of guitar distortion reveals something that is almost half of a normal riff. Masses of vocodered and pitch-shifted vocals flood the soundscape over a clicky and partially inaudible drum machine. Ultra-abrasive sound effects are dropped about almost randomly in only a partial sort of rhythmic context. It's noisy as hell most of the time, and when it's not, it's writhing and minimalistic in a very dark and bizarre way. And yes, maybe I'm simply into this kind of thing, but I like it a lot. It's pretty fucking sick for what it is, and the fact that most people will hate it just makes me like it more. Livercage doesn't really have a style of their own: they have an aesthetic and a general sound, and they plug songs into that format. That's why you get a track like 'Through The Sludge'; it's a drone track, but the crackling, shimmering guitar and quiet, echoing background vocals make it fit perfectly with the rest of the music. It's also one of the best tracks on here, even though it really IS just six minutes of guitar crackle, distant vocals, and some subtle keyboards. Then you have other things like the pure Roadkill Sodomizer style of 'Frozen In The Sky', with its cacophonous vocals and atonal 'solo' or whatever term you'd use for that sort of bizarre, midpaced lead. The most 'normal' style that the band possesses, though, is the sort of thing you hear on 'Searching For Your Body': fairly uptempo, drum machine thumping away strangely in the background with a cloud of hazy not-quite-tremolo riffs perpetually hanging over and changing almost randomly, with vocals right out of The Axis Of Perdition in all their distorted glory reaching from caverns of bass-heavy sound like the monstrosities that Lovecraft never quite got around to writing about. Throw in some weird effects like the sawing sounds a third of the way through 'Bleeding Beneath The Sky Of Falling Snow', and you get something almost approximating music. There's no real melody. A burst of beautiful clean guitar will never come. The closest thing to that you'll get is the searchlight lead guitar with that siren quality of Meshuggah's sinuous leads. Otherwise, it's all atonal, abstract riffing. But this isn't music to be appreciated really based on instrumentation, which is admittedly somewhat crude. It IS meant to be appreciated on the level of atmosphere, and that's something that this release has. It's modern and very dark; the music is machinelike yet organic and chaotic. Imagine some foray into genetic engineering going horribly wrong ala 'Alien: Resurrection' only with unattractive Canadians instead of Sigourney Weaver. Sometimes the band goes into a sort of post-apocalyptic war march like halfway through 'What The Hell' which almost has a groove; or at least it would if the slurring, screaming cultist vocals over the top didn't distract you from the throbbing 4x4 house bass drum pumping away under the rest of the music. It's not a very fun listen, you see, and it's meant to be that way. It'd be rather artistic if the band didn't hate art so very much. I suppose if there was a nuclear holocaust and I was forced to spend the rest of my life wearing a gas mask in a vault hundreds of miles under the ground, this would be the one album to bring with me. I can't imagine another album that describes such a scenario as handily. Think of it as Skinny Puppy playing black metal and losing all their social commentary: this is more music about being alone and barely clinging to your last few shreds of sanity than affecting any sort of change. When the sky starts to blacken, I'll be ducking and covering to the sounds of 'When Your Mother Dies'. That little collapse of the drums at the end of that track is effectively the silent flash of light before everything you know and love is instantly disintegrated into radioactive ash. Beautiful. |