Irreversible Disintegration

I seem to be on a death metal kick lately, specifically with the more brutal side of death metal as well as deathcore. Russia is known for its vast collection of bands in the deathcore and brutal death metal genres alike, with acts such as Abominable Putridity and Katelepsy on the death metal side, as well as Ease of Disgust, who falls more under the deathcore category. Abnormity is a Russian metal band that tends to mix both brutal/slam death metal with a few elements from deathcore. And holy shit, it is crushing stuff.

This is a very consistent album. From the beginning, you know what you're getting. Crushing riffs, unforgiving slams, and a handful of really cool breakdowns. However, this band is far more comfortable in the brutal death metal genre than deathcore. The song "Disease of Humanity" contains both neck-snapping slams and a breakdown at the end that can even classify more as a slam than anything. There are a lot of chugged riffs that add quite a bit of groove to this album, evidence being the riffing before the first slam in "Emanation of Putrid Entrails". This song also contains a solid breakdown towards the end complimented quite well with furious double bass drumming until it slows down to a near crawling pace. This happens quite a bit. A lot of bands in this genre tend to rely on a really slow, dirgy pace in their slams. "Mechanical Maggots" is yet another example. The solo in this song, while being very short, is a nice break from all the slams.

A commonality within a lot of bands that play this sort of music is the use of programmed drums. I am honestly not 100% sure if this is a drum machine or not but I am leaning towards "yes". The drums sound way too tight and focused to be real and if they are, this is surely a very impressive drummer. I just don't hear that organic sound of an actual drum kit. I've been wrong on this before however; don't take me too seriously on this. The bass drum leads me to believe this is a drum machine and even the snare sounds somewhat artificial. Skepticism aside, the drum work is really good here. The blasts and pummeling double bass really adds to the overall brutality of the music.

This is a short album. At only 33 minutes in length, it pretty much follows what seems like the tradition a lot of brutal death metal bands tend to stick to. This helps the music to not become tiresome or boring. I must applaud Abnormity here because they manage to find a really nice stopping point. For anyone into brutal death metal, you will have no trouble picking this album up and getting into it, or rather you shouldn't have any trouble. Another fine addition to the Russian death metal catalog.

First impressions are important, but often deceiving, which is generally why it's best not to base one's life on them. It's a foregone conclusion that an impressive album art serves a band well, and that department sees yet another in a growing collection of Russian slam bands profiting from this eventuality in Abnormity's auspiciously timed debut Irreversible Disintegration. While implications that any disintegration would require an act of God to reverse need not apply, the album's title does tend to clue one in that the brutality factor of the slam death scene in general is starting to flirt with self-parody. Nevertheless, there are far worse things out there carrying said moniker, and the verdict on this album is a bit removed from the dumper.

There are two principle things that work against this album, namely an overall sense of sameness that occasionally borderlines on bland, and a very mechanical sounding production. The usual assortment of rapid paced blasting trades blows with a slow trudging slam assault that, while well executed, comes off as contrived. It hits with the solid force of a rock thrown at full strength, but more in the manner that of a singular stone amid a sea of interchangeable ones being chucked at a heretic. This is literally impossible to miss even at the album's inception with the competent yet woefully formulaic "Shattered To The Bone", which sees the guitar banging away on the same 3 notes for an extended period of time while the drums, which sound programmed, carry the song. Obligatory scream notes will ring out in a manner reminiscent of Machine Head, but otherwise there's little to differentiate one chug riff from the next between the blast sections.

Be all this as it may, there are several redeeming qualities to the overall execution of this album that makes it more average than terrible. Much like their Ruskie rivals Abominable Putridity, Abnormity avoids the overly popping drum character and tries to keep some semblance of middle between the down-tuned guitars and the frequent scream harmonics. Sadly, though they do have some technical chops that pop out from time to time, they seem to shy away from really cutting loose and end up hitting similar territory in the guitars and bass while relying on extreme blasts to carry the fast sections. There's a solid sweeping solo that comes in amid a crazed tremolo section on "Mechanical Maggots" that sees the monotony broken up pretty significantly. In fact, said song sounds like it could have fit into what Abominable Putridity did a year later on "The Anomalies Of Artificial Origin", which proved to be one of the better albums to come out of Russia in this style, and this whole album would have been much better had this approach been exploited more.

This is par for the course to anyone with a regular intake of slam death, and will probably not impress the connoisseurs, but there is a slight charm to it that keeps it from being a complete throwaway. Perhaps part of it is the slightly less gore-obsessed character when compared to the style's mainstays, which is pretty much captured in the otherworldly album art, which avoids the cartoonish autopsy visuals that tend to go with this band's musical handiwork. There's was definitely some potential here, but it's effectively buried under a sea of the usual cliches. There is far worse out there, but also a lot that is better.

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.

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.