Nespithe

Bands and albums being overrated is nothing new. There's plenty of material in the world of metal, and music in general, that gets far too much credit or respect than it deserves. Demilich's sole album, Nespithe, is a rare specimen, because despite being a relatively obscure album, it has somehow managed to become one of the most overrated death metal albums of all time. It receives constant worship from people who hail it as "a classic" and "a masterpiece of death metal" when in reality, it turns out to be a colossal piece of shit. It's a conglomeration of awful vocals and muddy, distorted "riffage" that drones on and on without a hint of being remotely enjoyable.

One of the main problems is the vocals that sound like belching. When I first listened to Nespithe, I started laughing and thought, "This is a joke, right?" Sure, the vocals are kind of funny for the first few minutes, and then you realize they're going to keep it up the entire album. The gurgling, belching vocals are annoying as hell and would much better be suited for a band in the style of Cock And Ball Torture, and even in that case they wouldn't have been good, just more fitting to the style of music. If Demilich had gone with standard death metal vocals, they might have been slightly better, but this wouldn't have saved the album as a whole.

Now onto the other aspects. The one good thing about this album is the drumming. While it's more or less standard technical death metal drumming that doesn't stand out in any way, it's still nice to hear amid the big mess of noise that is this album. The guitar tone is terrible, and the riffs, which are supposedly "unorthodox" and "unique", sound like a barrage of random notes. They drone around and around you and aren't memorable in the slightest, they just go in one ear and out the other. Once in a while an interesting riff did catch my ear, most noticeably in the songs Within the Chamber of Whispering Eyes, The Planet That Once Used to Absorb Flesh in Order to Achieve Divinity and Immortality, and Raped Embalmed Beauty Sleep, but for the most part the riffage was an endless onslaught of repetitive drudgery.

Now, I'm not new to death metal, I love bands like Autopsy, Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, Obituary, Coffins, Immolation, and the like. But Demilich do absolutely nothing for me. The awful vocals coupled with the messy-sounding instrumentation form a death metal album devoid of enjoyment. The only reason it got a 40% was because of the occasional good riff and the drumming, as well as the fact that despite how bad it is, I recognize it as death metal (unlike similarly bad bands such as Brain Drill). Nevertheless, it's still an album to be avoided. For weird death metal, you're much better off with Macabre.