Collusion

Well, considering I got The Machine before I found a copy of Collusion, this review will be a comparison with The Machine for the most part. Anyway:

It's hard to tell that this is the same Dead World that released The Machine the year after Collusion. Maybe it was the fact that John Canady had a full band on this album, but it's true what the genre tag says about it being death metal. This first effort lacks some of the industrial flavor of their newer material, though.

The vocals are pretty much average death metal fare, except instead of dominating the mix, the mix dominates them. They're deep and echoing, but muffled, making it a bit hard to gauge just how deep they are. The vocals are sparse, but when they do show up, the guitar usually pushes them to the background somewhere. That's another thing: on some other death metal album, you'd expect to hear bass out the ass (COUGHMORTICIANCOUGH). Here guitar dominates, with undistorted bass taking more of a back seat.

This album is much in the same vein as The Machine, I suppose, except everything is tuned down an octave or two. It's true that Godflesh worship is a significant part of this band. The overall tempo is midpaced, or rather, slow for death metal, similar to Godflesh's slower moments. There are also a lot of Godflesh-like guitar leads and feedback moments rising above the other instruments to be found here, particularly in Regina Confessorum, which consists mainly of a couple backing bass lines and an endless stream of guitar leads and spoken samples.

The lyrics especially (of which there are few, regrettably) resemble the lyrics of Godflesh's earlier material, in that they're mostly a few short barked sentences, except Collusion uses a lot more of them.

The sample-based tracks offer a break from the death metal by invoking stifled, and in a way, soothing sounds of industry. If it weren't for the fact that they made up a third of an already short album, I might like them a little more. Once you leave them out, there's only about 26 1/2 minutes of actual metal, so Collusion definitely loses some points for this.

That all said, although I do prefer Collusion's style a little, some of the riffs suffer the same lack of creativity problem as on The Machine, and considering about a third of the album is filler, it suffers more than The Machine did. If you like to take breaks between crushing death metal riffs, go ahead and buy this first, there are plenty of cheap copies to be found. If you want an industrial metal album with more of a matured sound, go buy The Machine first. The way I see it, they're both worth your money.

Standouts: Regina Confessorum, Miasma, Saturnalia