2007 Demo

There's a lot of brutal death metal bands, but Abnormality is better than a good amount of them, though I'd be somewhat hard pressed to tell you why. It just seems like this is a band that's put more time and attention into the way they craft their music, instead of doing what a number of BDM groups do and just taking all the tremolo riffs they have and putting it into a four minute song. Each of the three real songs on this band's 2007 demo is very fully realized and clearly thought through. It doesn't fall into generic brutal death trappings, even though it uses the same general elements, and I'm able to listen to it repeatedly without finding it stupid.

'Brutality' is a nice thing to have in death metal, and I love my brutal death, but with brutality almost seems to come a necessary lack of focus. What makes something brutal these days really seems to often be how many things can be going on at the same time, how discordantly they can run against each other and how abrasive it can sound; pretty much death metal playing grindcore. And generally, grindcore should stay grindcore in that regard, because there're very, very few bands that can pull that style off. Origin and Internal Suffering are a couple of them, and Abnormality is, to an extent, another. Back in the earlier days of the style, the brutality was used as a tool to augment songwriting, not as an end in and of itself. See 'None So Vile', 'Effigy Of The Forgotten', etc. Abnormality is willing to put the songwriting first and the brutality second without really letting up on either, which immediately makes this much more interesting than most BDM out there today.

While BDM is at least superficially aggressive, there seems to be an extra element of it in Abnormality. Vocal lines are evenly rhythmic and constantly leaping forward at the listener, and the riffs, while obfuscatingly technical most of the time like the majority of brutal death metal these days, do slow down, very occasionally to something vaguely approximating a breakdown. As you'd expect, the material here is mostly high speed and blasty more than slow and squealy, which I would say is refreshing except for how all brutal death falls into one of those categories these days. I like the instrumental performances. Dual vocals are strangely well employed, despite how they're basic growls. Strangely enough, it seems that the non-dedicated vocals of Michael O'Meara are used more than the dedicated ones of Mallika's, whose higher growls in contrast to the former's lower, more traditional Mortician-style grunts are used more as an accent than a primary vehicle. But this is good: the dual high-low vocals that often stream together work very well to convey the proper aura of intensity. The drum performance is also a very nice feature: it's got that sort of overt, excessively fill-laden aspect of mid-era Nile but actually works with the sort of overt, excessively fill-laden music that Abormality plays. Plus, the drum sound is great. I love the snare; it's like a drum stick tapping on a hardwood desk, which sounds stupid described, but is awesome on record.

So I guess this demo is mostly something you have to hear for yourself to really determine its value. As someone who's tired of hearing everyone clone Pyrexia or Brodequin, this is a good listen from a set of musicians who aren't quite thinking outside the box, but are feeling in the corners a bit. Recommended.