Controlled Elite

The more things change… you can feel your tongue fighting to coil around that phrase, that shameful cliché, and force it back down into your vocal chords when you’re listening to 'Controlled Elite', but it spews out like the rancid bile it is anyway. Your fingers won’t be able to stop themselves from typing it out in a spasm either, unless you do the right thing and take it upon yourself to break ‘em.

For all your humble scribe’s prevaricating on this point (it is damned hard to type with broken fingers), the cliché is an apt and perfectly fitting one in the case of 'Controlled Elite'; things really have stayed the same for this band in a big, big way. Arguably that’s not something to be surprised at; having broken up twice since their inception in 1995 and having only four releases to their name in all that time, it would be unfair to expect much in the way of pioneering noise.

But is too much to hope for at least one element that wasn't disinterred from the 1990s? Dehumanized don’t simply have the ‘old-school sound’ as it is understood today; what they have is a sound so exactly like a 90s death metal band that any single riff, blastbeat, or gargle could’ve been lifted clean out of any randomly selected extreme metal record of the period. Even the production colludes in this feel; in a minor miracle you’d have thought impossible in the days of autotune, it sounds EXACTLY like a Scott Burns record. What is this? Is Clinton still in office? Have we invaded Iraq yet? Why are the Twin Towers still standing?

Yes, it’s solid. Yes, in places it’s even atmospheric (see the charming ‘None Shall Remain’). Yes, it’s got a quite-funny cover that looks for all the world like a zombification of ‘Straight Outta Compton’. But everything about it, everything tiny little thing, has been done before, by major-name bands that were already struggling to stay afloat when Dehumanized were formed, and saying that this will chiefly be enjoyed by those who’ve forgotten who Malevolent Creation are is hardly high praise.


{Originally published: Soundshock Webzine, 05/02/2013}