Collision

Collision by C-187 is a largely despised album, and I get why: it's basically bizarre in every way. The concept of the band came from Mameli watching lots of episodes of COPS (yes, the long-running reality show that follows police officers as they bust bad dudes). The album was released in 2007, long after the heyday of COPS, and long after the trend of suburban kids romanticizing North American street gang life had died down. The album features three of the biggest names in old school progressive death metal but is, for the most part, a groove metal affair. But wait, on top of being an outdated gang life-obsessed groove metal record, it also has a lot of Al Di Meola-esque jazz elements.

Like I said, this record is truly bizarre.

BUT, all that said, I don't think this is a bad record. I actually think there is a ton to like here, and I still genuinely enjoy this record after many listens over several years.

Musically, I love everything that is going on here. I like that the riffs use jazzy, angular chords that you will not hear on virtually any other metal record -- Mameli eschews typical power chords in favour of 7th chords, tritones, and all manner of other layered, nuanced note combinations, and for someone like myself who has heard metal dudes hit power chords for 30-odd years, it's refreshing as all hell to hear someone mix it up like this. The guitar solos are just as weird and uncommon in metal, and done superbly -- you can hear that Mameli isn't some hack just making weird shapes with his fingers on his guitar neck or doodling chromatically. He has clearly studied jazz elements, understood them, and incorporated them into his writing here. Not only is that unique and impressive, it also just sounds really cool, which is ultimately the most important thing.

Tony Choy and Sean Reinert do fantastic jobs in their respective departments. Tony is locked in like always, but also makes effective use of the spaces in Mameli's riffs for lots of cool little bass licks and accents. Sean knows when to get weird and jazzy and play some insane and cool syncopated rhythms, when to just groove, and when to toss in 16th note double bass and make shit heavy.

All the instruments sound amazing. They're all bright and clear yet have plenty of body. The whole thing is mixed perfectly too. This record just about has it all!...

...

...But I guess we need to address the vocals and lyrics.

Yes, these both largely suck. The lyrics would be juvenile no matter how old the author was, but I just did the math and Mameli was around 40/41 when he wrote this record. That's absolutely shameful. "Murda"? "Cruisin' for a Bruisin"? Good grief. Also, to write about this kind of stuff with zero firsthand experience is just embarrassing. A 40-yr old Dutch man pretending to be a 20-yr old hood in Los Angeles. Woof.

The vocals don't ENTIRELY suck, but they do mostly suck. I've actually always wondered why Mameli chose Tony Jelencovich to sing on this record when his voice doesn't match the street gang rhetoric he is, ahem, "spitting." Occasionally he has some decent yells or grunts but most of his 'extreme' vocals sound lame and wannabe/tryhard-ish. His quasi-rapping is abysmal. His singing is on-key but the tone of his voice is just weird, nasally, thin, and once again simply does not suit the sound of a street gang-inspired record.

But you know what? Despite the shortcomings, I still like this album. The music really does it for me, and with his thick accent I can't make out what Jelencovich is saying a lot of the time anyway. As long as I don't pay too much attention to the singing or album cover, I can still find a lot to enjoy here.

Well, about the project consisting (almost entirely) of musicians Pestilence, Atheist and Cynic, the interest and sales should start to be more than decent, meanwhile...the project took a moment to come to an end. The C-187 is a project founded on the initiative of guitarist Patrick Mameli, bassist Tony Choy, drummer Sean Reinert and vocalist Tony Jelencovich, but not having much connection with the above - great after all! - names. Three of the gentlemen, returning to heavier playing due to this project, unfortunately decided to hit the style, which - apart from Mameli's ideas similar to those from Pestilence - inspires by...Machine Head, Soulfly and this type of bands. Well, this could not be a sign of lofty music right away.

It's a pity, because the chance for meaningful material was - paradoxically - quite big! Instrumentally, "Collision" is not the most typical and there could be get a lot out of it. There are even Patrick's twisted riffs and solos reaching both patents from modern metal and "Spheres" (which comes into something bizarrely different), Reinert's more organized and "groovy" drumming or the occasional standout bass parts of Choy (unfortunately without madness from Atheist style). So, quite a potential for something much more interesting. However, the C-187 also has a singer. Well, Jelencovich's participation in this project is something that completely puts out the whole "Collision". So much so that after the first 2-3 songs you get totally enough with this album.

As I mentioned, instrumentally it's quite fun, furthermore!, some ideas can be easily subsumed under the announcement of patents from the reunion Pestilence (eg. some "modern" riffs or those "disappearing" clean). Well, but...there are vocals! Vocals successfully destroyed literally every track on this album! Tony sings in a number of different ways: from screaming, fake-rapping, to pure singing. Full package. It's just that, it's such an irritating and hard-to-digest package that the remaining parts of the instruments are not particularly important with the singing shot out from the main ideas. In neither of these styles Jelencovich's vocals are even decent. "Knee Deep In" (interesting atmosphere), "Homicide" (crazy guitars) or "Cruisin 'For A Bruisin'" (also crazy guitars) can be titled as such quite okay, but not much else. With such a singer it was simply impossible to get more interesting results.

And I must admit that considering the skills of such musicians (and the fact that there are as many as 14 songs here!), it is a very poor result, when it's difficult to choose any highlights from the entire album. The C-187 is a project from the series for nobody - neither for fans of Pestilence, Cynic, Atheist, as well as those from more modern bands. In fact, "Collision" can only be seen from your own sick curiosity, what the first leaps of Mameli, Choy and (partly) Reinert looked like after such a long publishing break since their main bands broke up. But in this respect "Collision" doesn't look more impressive.

Originally on: https://subiektywnymetal.blogspot.com/2021/06/c-187-collision-2007.html

Traditionally, it’s the non-believers who fall down first during times of pestilence… then come the cynics, then the survivors from the previous plague. It’s an ever-revolving unerring sequence… however, a major glitch in the matrix has occurred here, and we, humans and non-humans alike, have to make sure it never happens again: all the participants in this collision have survived, up to the present day. A deliberate gesture of mercy from the Universe, anyone?

I guess so; I guess again that some artists out there are more blessed than others, and can get away with murder; especially if we have a constellation gathering of members of acts like Atheist, Cynic, and Pestilence. Musicians that have been jamming together since time immemorial, and for a change they have decided to surprise everyone, including themselves, with an oddity completely unrelated to anything they have created before… a challenge which every self-respected artist should attempt at some stage… undoubtedly.

Yes, sure, but why try your hands on the most simplistic style ever conceived on the earth plane? We’re talking about the 90’s groovy post-thrash parade… sticky stuff this one, compelling a team of some of the most visionary musicians on the circuit to delve into it, in the year 2007, when the old school resurrection campaign was in full bloom, and vestiges of the previous decade were not exactly very welcome. Nah, this is Patrick Mameli, Tony Choy, and Sean Reinert (R.I.P.) that we have here, united for the numetal cause with firm determination, manufacturing dry sterile jumpy riffs to no end, the quarrelsome very shouty vocals coming from the throat of one Tony Jelencovich (also the sludge/doomsters Transport League), a most vociferous presence seriously overshadowing the musical shenanigans at times. Not that the latter deserve much of attention being repetitive groovy chugs ranging from angry semi-rapping (“Roadblock (D.O.A.)”) to sleazy balladic/bluesy rockabilias (“Stalker”), to marginally loftier attempts at djent (“P.C.P. (Murda In My Head)”).

The guys do eventually score a winner, or at least a semi-winner, “Homicide”, a twisted atmospheric creeper that could have qualified for the B-side of “Spheres”, the other genuinely interesting moment being the melodic quasi-progressiver “Sidewalk Chalk” with Jelencovich helping the more ambitious cause with a more attached cleaner timbre. The dispassionate strolls of mid-period Meshuggah (“Life Is Dead”) receive a nod towards the end, and in general the more contrived passages here can pass for scrapped tractates from the Swedes’ repertoire. The thing is that this all is so predictable from beginning to end that it would be hard for the audience to accept this entry as a work of the mentioned artists; yes, people do get carried away, but this here borders on the blackout… and I don’t even want to think that this stuff had inspired the guys to reform their entities, as very shortly after it both Cynic and Pestilence returned to the scene, and Atheist’s comeback stint followed suit two years later.

Needless to add, neither of these three recordings contains even a single grain of this charade here, but Mameli did decide to improve on it, and he wrote a “Doctrine” on it under the Pestilence umbrella in 2011, a more convincing but still highly unnecessary entry into the discography of one of the finest metal acts in history. The others quickly forgot about the whole collaboration, and have never been seen colliding again… and I don’t blame them; the Universe can only show mercy once, before another plague descends upon the non-believers and their zealous associates.

By simply glancing at the track listing of ‘Collision’, it would be reasonable to suspect it was brainless hip hop (with slightly improved spelling, in most cases) but this is not the case. C-187 are a technical metalcore band from the Netherlands, despite explicit American references. Whilst the band are one of those metalcore band that strays out of the generic and dull Bullet for my Valentine camp alongside bands such as Psyopus, C-187 fail to substantiate ‘Collision’ with variety.

The vocals, however, are varied. Vocalist Tony J.J. utilizes an inventory of shouts, growls, grunts, spoken word, rap and clean singing throughout the album, his most ‘versatile’ being on ‘Strapped With Heat’. The guitars predominantly pad out tracks with bland riffing but on ‘P.C.P. ‘(Murda In My Head)’ the guitar and drum synergy produces lustrous result C-187 can be proud of. ‘Sidewalk Chalk’ is made convincingly sinister by the more than competent guitar job and the double bass on ‘Roadblock (D.O.A.)’ is admirable.

All in all, the album shows that this new band have a lot of ideas but fail to organise them in the most profitable manner, musically. The music is not coherent or chaotic enough to strike the mark, leaving them lost in the mediocre middle ground. Of course the biggest tragedy is the musicians who are featured on this release. While they could have produced a band like Blotted Science, they stuck with this limiting genre. With more work, something special could be produced in the near future...and not related to hardcore.

Originally written for www.soundshock.net

This may be one of the worst albums released by some of the best musicians of all time. From the name and the juvenile imagery, to the lame and unimaginative musicianship of all the members, this album is, for lack of a better word, stupid. Now, as I'm sure most would agree, when you combine musicians such as Sean Reinert, Tony Choy, and Patrick Mameli, one would expect to be blown away by the technicality and originality of the work they produce, but this band is fucking terrible. Every song is exactly the same, from the hardcore influenced vocals, to the painfully basic drumlines and guitar riffs. Don't get me started on the bass, which is almost non-existant.

After listening to this entire album, yes I actually made it through the whole 41 minutes, I couldn't help but ask myself, "What the hell is this?" Why would they write such horrible, stupid, juvenile, rap-poser-metal? Who knows, maybe they wanted to go a little more mainstream (a lot more mainstream I should say). It just doesn't make any sense, I still can't wrap my head around how such brilliant musicians could create such horrible poser-metal. Even the song titles are ridiculous, Cruisin' 4 a bruisin', Murda, Drugged and Mugged? Are you fucking kidding me? Are you gangsters now? Has Sean Reinert and Patrick Mameli (who is from the fucking Netherlands) all of a sudden joined gangs and become gangster-musicians? What the fuck.

All in all this album is horrible, never buy it, and if you value your respect for Sean Reinert and Tony Coy for their work in Cynic, Atheist, or Gordian Knot, you will not listen to this, because you will think much less of them by the time you angrily push the stop button on your CD player. Stay away if you know what's good for you.