Individual Thought Patterns

Recorded at some point during 1992, Individual Thought Patterns marked yet another shift in Death's already withered musical direction. This time around, Evil Chuck decided to hire the best musicians he could find, have them play around with free jazz, and then just stop bothering with writing those pesky riff things. To compensate for this horrible fault, he decided to play what was left of them with an annoyingly thin guitar tone, and then just ask Steve DiGiorgio to follow around whatever he played on the bass. Then have Gene Hoglan patch up the resulting awkward mess as best as he could, and Andy LaRocque sometimes comes in for a nice solo. As you can see, these are not small-time names. All of these musicians were very good at their respective instruments, and for the most part played in very good bands, which had, at this point, already released a bunch of very good albums. Nevertheless, as is the case with Death, one only has to look at the "Composed by..." lines on the booklet to understand why none of this matters in the end. Because, after releasing Human, Chuck was suffering from such a severe case of Buttcephaly (cephalic comes from head, butt comes from butt, as in, having one's head so far up one's own butt that one starts suffering from oxygen deprivation) that little could be done to put reason into the man. This is what followed.

The main problem with this album (that is, one of many problems), lies in the songwriting. I'm not even sure if Schuldiner just didn't write all the music as a way to vent his lyrics about how everyone's dumb, but he certainly didn't write riffs to match them. Everything is overly technical for no apparent reason besides, well, being technical. The consequence is that the songs don't feel like songs, but as random bursts of riffs and leads that start playing for no reason and stop for even less of a reason. A complex piece will start playing for a couple of seconds, and then be completely forgotten in time. This leaves the songs, which are already fortunately quite short in length, with very little room for build-up. This wouldn't be so much of a problem, and would even feel exciting in an anxious sort of way if the riffs were any good - they aren't. In fact, most of the time, the backing riffs behind the solos are better than the solos which compose the building blocks of the songs, which leaves you with strong lead sections that just fail to go anywhere inside of the actual song. I know Andy's talented - I compulsively sing songs off Abigail out loud all the time, especially in the shower and during lectures - so I don't need him to remind me that he can shred every ten seconds if it's not going to have any meaning within the context of the composition. The entire album is like that.

To keep on with the subject of the performances, there's the rhythm section by Hoglan and DiGiorgio. Gene Hoglan is, once again, a superb drummer; but whereas his performance with say, Dark Angel was relentless and vicious, here he opted to go for a jazzier style, which feels over-done and anti-climatic. He's definitely better at complementing the songs than Sean Reinert, and it works for the jazzy feeling that the compositions try to achieve, but it doesn't evoke any kind of emotional response at all. It's just him haphazardly changing beats on that horribly sounding kit with that tiny little snare sound which seriously sounds like it's made of plastic instead of... whatever it is snares are usually made from (not plastic!). DiGiorgio's basslines usually follow the guitars around, which is a shame, as he could have easily played anything aside from that and keep them more active. He will play something different at times when both guitars are harmonizing, or do little melodies on its own as is the case of the background during the title track, but without any solid guitar work for them to cling to, they're lost as nothing more than a way to say "Bass over here! Getcha bass right here!". The bass tone also lacks a bit of depth, but that's completely irrelevant at this point.

And then, we have the free jazz-influenced sections. I could describe them as terrible, but that would be to imply that I consider them as sections in the first place. They come and go - there will be a riff playing while Chuck tells us about how he doesn't understand human emotions, and then everything will cut off to couple of sections where the guitars harmonize between each other and the bass does a spaced out lick in the background as the drums accentuate with jazzy cymbal accents, and then everything awkwardly comes to a halt, and back we go to stories about how much Evil Chuck hates gore in his lyrics. I don't think they count as solo or lead sections. They're not riff sections either. They're not really sections at all, if we're feeling truthful. They're what happens when you master an album wrong and end up pasting pieces of different, completely unrelated jazz fusion albums of the period at inconsistent intervals. It doesn't sound good. Then again that wouldn't surprise me, given how plastic the production sounds. Plastic, like Gene Hoglan's snare sound, but it's a sound that plagues the entire album - it gives it a very synthetic feel, which I guess ends up working well with the synthetic delivery.

Finally, as the final nail in the coffin, Schuldiner's vocals. He goes for a more throaty approach than what he did on Human, but the execution is just a stale as it was there. He pronounces everything in the same tone, with the same modulation, at exactly the same volume. All in all it makes for a very boring delivery, as it is the equivalent of a clean vocalist singing everything in the same note, as he follows the same rhythm the riffs are playing. Because otherwise they would be harder to play live! His vocals definitely aren't as bad here as they would be on the next two albums, but that doesn't really make me think better of them in any case. If lyrics about goat fucking and Satan's penis will make for a more exciting vocal performance, I'll take those any day over Evil Chuck monotonously ranting about how everyone thinks they're smart but they're not, and also a plethora of other things that I don't really care about. Ghouls attacking a church to crush the holy priest seems like an infinitely more fun activity to do, anyway.

There you have it: If Spiritual Healing was a mere bump on the road and Human a figurative fall forward, Individual Thought Patterns is the beginning of the vertical cascade-like drop that followed. They hadn't quite reached terminal downwards velocity yet, but the moment would come soon enough.