Irreversible Disintegration

Apparently determined to embody mediocre Russian brutal death metal that manages to always fuck up in some obvious but grievous manner, Abnormity grabbed onto every stereotype they could and rushed out of the starting gate with an album which was actually pretty decent at its core, but full of stupid and egregious errors that could really only be committed by bands from Russia. Similar to Visceral Disgorge, Abnormity are another band full of nobodies who released a debut in the early 2010s and were subsequently the greatest new brutal death metal band on the block, for reasons I cannot possibly fathom - this doesn't really do its job better than anything else in the brutal death metal scene, but most brutal death metal fans' tastes are an absolute enigma to me so I guess I shouldn't even try to understand it. To be fair, I hated this almost immediately the first time I became aware of it and it's much easier for me to stomach now, so despite my prejudices against this sort of stuff it sucks little enough for me to have gotten over it and come to a lukewarm conclusion on its quality.

Like 90% of all modern brutal death metal bands, Abnormity is deathcore-influenced to some extent or another, but the deathcore influences here are surprisingly a lot more tasteful than a lot of modern slam death metal bands can manage. The slams here mostly feel like bona fide slams instead of watered-down Carnifex chugs, and the closest this album gets to deathcore in a rhythmic sense are the un-muted triplet pattern slams that bring to mind something from a nu-Pathology album. The album is full of eerie deathcore riffs, though, like something you'd get off of Dead in My Arms, and instead of using faster slams to mix up the pace the Abnormity will usually just toss an unhinged, chaotic deathcore riff at the song with an absurdly speedy blast beat to back things up.

I rarely ever describe slam death metal albums as "boring", but I think that works pretty well here... almost everything about Irreversible Disintegration is monochromatic. It's not really bad because of that, but it does lead to everything being really, really middle-of-the-road. None of the slams or deathcore riffs are awful, but they're never amazing either - it's like all of them got put through some sort of homogenizing process that turned them into undeniably Abnormity-esque slams but got rid of any outliers in quality. On the whole, most of the slams are too slow and rhythmically static to give off any feelings of brutality, and the deathcore-esque guitar tone doesn't help. Abnormity's vocals aren't doing anything good for the music, either; they might as well have been ripped straight from In the End of Human Existence's master recordings, because they sound exactly like the snore-inducing crap Abominal Putridity's first vocalist spewed on that band's debut. The guy here just sort of croaks and brees and then, presumably, copy-pastes it and layers it everywhere because it sounds the exact same throughout the entire album. Listening to the vocals is about as engaging of an experience as staring at a rock.

The real bane of Irreversible Disintegration, though, is the fucking production. Let's face it, everything about this album is so synthetic that it robs the music of any chance to conjure an atmosphere. I'm not really sure if the drummer on this album was a machine or a real drummer whose kit was poorly triggered, but my uncertainty should say enough about how shitty and fake the drum sound is; every time the snare hits, I fall farther and farther into a permanent migraine. The guitars are polished to hell, even more than your average deathcore album, and the slams suffer a lot because of it. I'm not really sure why so many BDM bands keep making their music as crystal-clear as possible just because they can; next thing you know we'll have "acoustic brutal death metal" bands playing on classical, undistorted guitars in order to achieve MAXIMUM SONIC CLARITY or some bullshit.

With less annoyingly synthetic production and maybe a better approach to writing slams, this would be a pretty good album, almost like a poor man's Ingested. Instead, you get this: a clone of In the End of Human Existence that sounds loud and clean but totally devoid of atmosphere as a result. It's heavy, I guess, but unless you're dumb enough to sit down and think to yourself "Man, I wish Abominable Putridity could've made two shitty albums in a row", you don't need to hear this.