Empire of the Obscene

Mind blowing competency, no band on this planet can simultaneously sound like Meshuggah, Megadeth, Death (band) , Gojira in parts and still remind you of Dream Theater, near impossible. I seriously think these guys are at the cutting edge of a new genre called technical plagiarism. Mind you there is a huge effort involved here, they had to listen to 25 years of Dave Mustain solos, now that is a LOT, carefully handpick them and make sure that they do not forget to make the riffs a tad lazier but then I have a complaint that during this magnum ripping opus they forgot to change "Hangar 18" riffs but behold, the result is magnificent piece of music called "Fields Of Predations" which sounds so much better than rest of the record because riffs are still original.

Leads had gone through even more complicated screening process, this time its more versatile cross genre plagiarism. Andromeda, Dream Theater and rest of the progressive metal brigade seems to be their main targets here, If I start listing the bands with whom Revocation will have to share royalty then even the metal archives data base of progressive bands may not suffice. Again a thumbs up for the huge effort involved in searching and carefully recognizing repeatable pieces of creation. The Compositions follow a noticeable pattern too, first the lead plays, then screaming vocals, then riffs with drums, then again a lead, then riffs, then more screams, first six songs are formed by repeatedly looping this sequence. This is more or less what Dream Theater does but with original stuff and with better music. This is in a way understandable, these guys might have had a deadline to meet with the label. Probably they might have just run out of time while they were scanning the history of thrash and progressive metal for pieces of leads and riffs that they hardly got time to mix in a less noticeable way.

The above complaint of mine is some what taken care in the second half of the record where they have done some improvisation in piracy, the sequences in the compositions are more complicated to dissect. Here the focus of plagiarism are drums and bass, I should have guessed this when I heard the second song "Tail From the Crypt", the drums at the starting are right out of "Catch Thirtythree" but I have to admit amazing perfection there. The starting couple of songs in the second half are mostly influenced by drumming styles of Meshuggah and Gojira but slightly slower than them but in comparison to the first half of the record this is almost original stuff. Then there is a gap filler called "Stillness" which i forwarded enthusiastically to explore more creative forms of plagiarism. Unfortunately the fun here was getting over, even though songs still had the familiar feel it was getting increasingly tedious to find the patterns in ripping off because these guys were getting real professional at it. Thankfully the riffs were still out of Megadeth's text book, the slow strumming of rhythm guitar at the end of "Age Of Iniquity" was almost exactly like Dave Mustain.

"Empire Of the Obscene" is no misnomer, its a celebration of obscene marauded music, actually the record has no real music in it just pieces of borrowed sounds. It is beyond logic that how can such a creation of mediocrity get a label to publish. These guys might know how to play instruments because they chose some of the toughest bands for emulation, but mechanically repeating a sound is no brainier, its just a test of skill which is far from real creativity.