Brave Melvin from the Southern Point

I remember back in the day reading an interview with Consolation guitarist Dennis in an old Aardschok magazine (March 1996, in case you're wondering). In said interview, this musician chastised the interviewer for "only" giving his new album an 80 percent rating, further adding that every riff was well thought out and that production, playing and performance were brilliant, adding that "in this genre nothing of the like has been released in the Netherlands". Settle down already, Kanye, time for a closer look some 25 years later, I say.

As a first, I'd like to say that this album has one of the most anti-climactic openers of all time. The song "Murder" kicks off with brutal riffing and pounding percussion that promises a brutal death/grind tornado to come, only to peeter out in a noodling guitar melody within 10 seconds. Within 10 seconds, for fuck's sake! After that the band plod through a mediocre collection of death/grind tracks, a style that has been done way better in the past, for instance by their fellow countrymen Altar a good year earlier, on their classic "Youth against Christ" album. So much for being unique in the Netherlands, eh? On top of that, the band showcase a total lack of decent songwriting capacities, which gives the listener a whole lot of peculiarly arranged and even confusing compositions without clear beginnings or endings. The songs just happen, they are just there, so to speak. A better approach for Consolation would have been to just pummel the listener into submission with brute force, that would have at least made more of an impression than 13 half-baked almost-compositions. There are some points of recognition to be found on here, though, too bad those are riffs that almost border on plagiarism. Take the song "Moribund", a song that has a riff in it that I could swear was the riff for Suicidal Tendencies' "I Saw Your Mommy...". This feeling rears its head again in the following track ("Truckload of Hatred"), but then for a riff that sounds suspiciously close to Slayer's "Black Magic". It's sad to say, but these were the only riffs that I remembered clearly after playing this album. On top of the curious compositions are perhaps some of the most annoying vocals I have ever heard. You know that sound drunk people make when they see a metalhead walking down the street, that growled "UUUUUURRGGHHH!!!"? This singer kinda sounds like that for the duration of this whole album, occasionally throwing in a screamed delivery that possibly sounds even more grating. Also, this cd lasts for some 36 minutes, but it could just as easily been 360 minutes, at least that's how it feels.

The production is equally grating. This album was recorded at Franky's Recording Kitchen, a studio that has that peculiar talent to make everyone that records there sound equally the same. If you would play other productions from the same studio, like the aforementioned "Youth against Christ", Nembrionic's "Psycho One Hundred" and after that this Consolation album, you'd have a hard time telling who's who, because they all sound the same! The production's most outstanding feature (for all the wrong reasons) is the ultra triggered drums, making them sound as dry as your grandma's vagina, with the kicks sounding like someone is slapping a wet newspaper against a wall. The drum sound is so oppressive that it pushes the guitars into the background, which is just a bloody shame.

Now, perhaps you are asking yourself this question: "After all that shit you talked about this album, why is that a shame, then?" Simple: because the playing on this album is excellent. Even if most riffs are not that memorable and the compositions are on the meager side, the playing here is actually really good. This shouldn't come as a surprise, because both guitarists are students of former Pestilence member Patrick Uterwijk, and it's hard to imagine him being a lackluster teacher. If only he had taught his students that the line between well thought-out and far-fetched can be pretty thin, this album could have been more than the snooze fest is has turned out to be.

In Aardschok's review of this album (February 1996, in case you're wondering) the reviewer mentions that this is one of those albums that needs time to grow, but I'm going to conclude by putting it like this: I've been watering this one for quite some time now, but I'm afraid that for me it has done all the growing it was capable of. It has some OK moments, like the black metal album closer, the Cryptic Slaughter-gone-death/grind opening to the earlier mentioned "Truckload of Hatred" and the influence of Pestilence's "Testimony ..." album in a track like "Stahlhelm", but these elements can't save this album from being the boring non-event it is, I'm afraid. Perhaps if you look at it as being a primitive example of tech death metal, it maybe holds it's ground, but as a death metal/grindcore release this just misses the point.