The Bowels of Repugnance

Relatively capable groovy/blasty death metal that sounds like early Lividity. It's not very interesting; at this stage in their career Broken Hope pulled off neither the grooves nor the blasts in any unusually good way, and this album is really just a retreading of death metal convention from start to end. The songs are rather unusually short, which is a bit different, and the incorporation of clean guitar interludes is somewhat interesting, but it's really a case of putting lipstick on a pig.

As previously stated, this sounds very similar to Lividity plus some early Cannibal Corpse; lots of atonal midpaced sections before going into grooves and blasts. The production is hollow and sort of distant, one of those cases where you feel like you always need to turn it up but are never quite able to hear everything you want. Vocals are a straight growl, which, like the rest of the music, are very one-dimensional in execution and placement. This is not an album with any surprises on it, and it's no wonder that the name Broken Hope is somewhat synonymous with stupid death metal fans who lack taste.

It's not a particularly bad album; it's simply mediocre and came out at the very beginning of death metal's slow slide into irrelevance before reemerging at the end of the millennium. The band's later works like 'Loathing', ironically released in 1997, arguably the absolute nadir for death metal as a genre, are much more worthwhile and genuinely interesting and unique works. This is simply filler and I don't particularly recommend it.