Irreversible Disintegration

Good slam is like a B-horror movie: it's schlocky and full of stupid cliches, but you can't help yourself when you laugh at every corn syrup-y kill. Bad slam is something like Waking the Cadaver, where the noise of each breakdown is bunched up against another one and ends up creating a torrent of shit. Abnormity's Irreversible Disintegration is stupid, there's no way around that fact, but in between all of the slams and filler tremolo lines there is something to enjoy.

There's no need to tell anyone this band is Russian because the Abominable Putridity comparisons are readily apparent from the word 'go' in "Shattered To the Bone," a nice and uptempo song that gets the album off to a great start. This and the second track, "Disease of Humanity", are pretty much everything you need to know about Abnormity. There's a riff somewhere in there, then a trem line, and then some slams. And a bass drop. Every song needs a bass drop. If I had one thing to say to these guys, it would definitely be that they need to step their bass drop game up. Why stop at one per song? Fuck it, let's bookend each slam with a bass drop while we're at it!

But seriously, there's actually about a bass drop per song and that gets to the inherit problem of any and all slam records: they're too goddamn repetitive and hard to listen to all the way through by themselves. Don't get me wrong, they're great for exercise and falling asleep to, but just sitting down and listening to one can become a headache. Everything becomes a blur of noise and nonsense after a while, especially when you have low register breakdowns and a drum machine on top of it all.

Speaking of which, the production job is actually really fantastic. The guitars have a crisp bottom end and punch through when the triplets and chugs come in, the bass is semi-audible but very boring, and the drum machine has a relatively good tone. Unfortunately it's very obvious the program was written by a guitarist who wants the drums to be locked precisely in with the guitars for the most part. It's also pretty hilarious when you hear the gravity blasts without the accents and no dynamics, just straight *CRACKCRACKCRACK*.

However, Irreversible Disintegration does have something important in its favor: it's pretty short. It's only 33 minutes, so the slam jam is only long enough to start to get boring rather than continue being boring for another ten minutes. Rather than investing all of their time and energy into where the next bass drop should go, these guys should have really thought about incorporating more solos (i.e "Mechanical Maggots" even if it's pretty bad), actual riffs, or really anything else.

In the end it comes down to how much you like slam. If you salivate every time you hear those fourths and the china cymbal, then you should buy this right now. If you want something with a little more variety and less UmJammer Slammy, then this really isn't for you.