Swamped in Gore

After my Wombbath review and some discussions about death metal with a friend I've been thinking about bad classic period death metal. Said friend's argument is that practically anything from the correct era playing the basic tenets of the genre will be praised excessively despite being useless shite, which is an argument that I can agree with to a point, said point being the useless shite part of things. While I can think of many, many hugely overrated, mediocre death metal classics that are worshiped as being infallible, actually finding any that are out and out bad is surprisingly difficult. Even the bigger names which particularly anger me with inescapable popularity aren't really painful releases when I really look at the music offered it; Altars of Madness or Slowly we Rot aren't horribly awful when I really look at what's on offer, maybe they're a bit too thrashy for me, maybe I think they've been done better elsewhere, but they're not really bad. I guess bad old school death metal is a lot like horrible toothy oral sex or half chewed pizza; I may deride it heavily in public, but if a retard with a heavy lung infection shows up on my doorstep offering theirs I'm probably going to accept it and feel somewhat satisfied about myself later.

My basic line of thought is that the genre's absolute core goals are exceptionally low, and exceptionally easy to achieve. Despite the hyper atmospheric minimalism of many retro OSDM bands, the original stuff was usually pretty numbskulled and just wanted to pound you over the head with riffs and weight. You very rarely had to deal with riffless, meandering slogs of overwrought drivel, instead you'd almost always get a high riff count with plenty of tempo changes, plenty of headbangable parts, a nice thick and suitably raw production and some angry grunting; it was an inherently tolerable sound. This was pretty damned easy to pull off really, bands didn't need to be hugely inventive, skilled or rich to execute this uniquely simple idea at least somewhat competently, and even then bands which fucked it up kinda made them sound a little different and exciting compared to the massive armies of competent OSDM cannon fodder. Hell, even the previously derided Wombbath still get a technically passing grade from me and they've got like four above mediocre riffs on their whole album and maybe one cool melody, purely because the basic idea of OSDM is so intrinsically palatable. An utterly mediocre pre-'95 death metal album tends to be more pleasant to sit through than an utterly mediocre release in any other genre to me.

...Which leads me to Broken Hope, one of the first acts which come into my mind when thinking about bad early 90's death. Like Wombbath, their biggest crime is being boring rather than outright obnoxious, but Swamped in Gore certainly makes the crossover from the “easily distracted and not overly enthralled” side of bored which most of the lacking entries into the genre exist, and into the "Ok, I'm getting annoyed by this shit now" side. These guys don't have those four good riffs and a melody. There isn't one riff on here which stands out, there isn't one tempo change which elicits any kind of visceral response, there is no variation in the song writing structure on any of the 11 tracks, and the general sound of the album fails to pack in all that much weight or magnitude. Are many of the riffs really terrible in their own right? Not really when I really look at them I guess, but the album is simply as mediocre as humanly possible through its massively bloated 45 minute run rime, impressively so really.

Broken Hope definitely live up to the expectations of being from Chicago, a place where even tech death bands like Oppressor chug along at a midpaced crawl most of the time, and certainly stick to abusing the bottom string and clunking out grooving, moshable riffs in alarming numbers. I guess it could be compared to the sort of beatdown hardcore inspired stuff from New York, but Chicago death never seems quite so pissed off, instead aiming to be just heavy, catchy and groovy. It's a little bit of a hit and miss style as is, since it demands quite a lot in the way of pure riff composition skill and a nice production job to help carry such simple, reasonably non-atmospheric music. Cianide for instance were (and still are) very good at this general idea, successfully giving their simplistic grooves a lot of thick, morbid groove, while efficiently delivering bursts of power whenever things sped up. Broken Hope are very bad at it.

Swamped in Gore is a lifeless bore with no redeeming features. Most of the music is midpaced and based around chugging on low notes with little no variation, and none of the grooves or riffs really have anything intriguing or fun about them. They're heavy enough I suppose, but hardly devastating enough to really cover for the lack of genuine musical appeal. In short the riffs here simply don't have enough excitement or energy to be entertaining on a surface level, and the band is about as passionate and refined as an Indonesian slaughterhouse so there are no atmospheric qualities to make up for it. The band speeds up on a semi-frequent basis, but really the riffing styles never change too drastically from bottom string plonking which neuters any sort of visceral momentum created by the blasts. I'd be surprised if the band used more than two strings for the whole damn album, and since they have absolutely no talent when it comes to writing meaty, imposing or catchy riffs that's a hell of a problem. This drags like hell even on the shorter and faster songs, but when you consider songs like "Gobblin' the Guts" and the title track are 6 and a half goddamned minutes long this really does stand out as likely favourite for the single most boring OSDM album created in the golden era.

But as stated earlier, mediocre and done to death riffing over an overly extended period isn't really a nail in the coffin for most early 90's death metal, I'd give many albums which I'd make similar complaints about a relatively favourable score in a lot of cases, there has to be something extra that Broken Hope fuck up here. That fuck up seems to be the production. Somewhat famously Swamped in Gore is the first wholly digital death metal ever recorded, so I guess it's not hugely surprising they got it so very wrong. This doesn't have the usual hallmarks of an overly digital production, the guitars aren't too clear and refined, the drums aren't mechanical and sterile and the whole thing isn't laughably loud so that the rises and falls are lost. This isn't a processed or robotic sounding record, it's just a remarkably flat sounding one. This is ridiculously timid sounding, the guitars are thick and distorted yet carry no weight, the drums are quiet enough so that they don't overpower the rest of the sound but it leaves them packing no punch whatsoever, and the admittedly pretty guttural vocals are pathetically faint in the mix. The whole album seems to be trying to execute the idea of not having anything be the main focus, but it does it by making everything equally meek; it lacks dynamics so badly that you could be forgiven for thinking they only used one string on the album instead of two.

I think what makes this my easy number one pick for the most boring straight up death metal album around is really how it fails to really pull off any of those really easy elements of DM with any sort of flair or life despite having a pretty decent riff count in every song. There are no interesting riffs, there is no energy, the production makes everything even more tedious, there are no good hooks, there is no atmosphere, there are no variations in approach or sound. There is nothing. This isn't like one of those occasions where I use some hyperbole and just ignore a few examples on the contrary since they're sparse exceptions, there is literally not a single one of any of those things at any moment, and as such it's the most boring pre-95 death metal album made. I can't of any audience this could appeal to, people who want the dumbed down simplicity of Cianide but without the malice and moodiness? People who want Gutted but without any of the extremity or violence? I dunno, all I know is this is an album that leaves me pretty bitter with boredom after about eight to nine minutes and it needs to go die. My search for bad DM will continue as I struggle to find something that actively frustrates me from the awfulness of its actual components so I can hate it outright rather than just get annoyed after prolonged exposure, but this was a pretty solid first place to look.