Bleed the Gemini

...because it's It's very likely that I'm one of maybe ten people that has ever heard Bleed the Gemini. This really is an isolated little piece of metal history. One of the guys in one of the bands is the owner of the long-defunct label Big Metal Records, and two of the five bands that were ever signed to that label are on this split, and I only came across it myself because these guys are habituated in the vicinity of my area and this was on sale for three bucks at a pawn shop. On an unrelated note, this is kind of a milestone in that it's the first split I'm ever reviewing. Cool!

Inveigh's side

Wow. I am legitimately and curiously perplexed by the music these guys have on display here! It's near impossible to classify this. According to a blurb on their last.fm clearly written by the band themselves it's "Old school thrash sensibility meets with new school death metal technicality and grindcore insanity", but I mean let's keep in mind this was released in 2005. New bands that were popping up were raised on death metal with an increasingly prominent hardcore presence, and I honestly think that's more of a staple of the music than grindcore. especially because of how clean the guitar tone sounds and how melodic a song like "New Age of Obedience" is. Additionally, there are frequently breakdowns very aesthetically deathcore in the songs- the simple, one-note start-stop chugging stuff. Surprisingly enough though, the breakdowns are very well done and not annoying because they're not dwelt upon and aren't the only thing attempting to carry the song. The riffs are the meat and potatoes, and they're some very...unique ones; sort of uptmepo and thrashy and kind of teetering on this line between consonance and dissonance all the time and ya know what? They're actually kind of cool. These guys have something hard to pin down that's also somewhat engaging and interesting. I don't usually enjoy this style of music much, but it usually doesn't have riffs like this.

Then I checked to see where these guys were from, and the final piece of the puzzle clicked in: These guys are from Montreal. Of course this is going to be good; the Quebecois music scene is honestly in my opinion one of the greatest in the entire world, with genre-bending, strange and unique bands coming from Quebec spanning a huge variety of genres. This ultimately ends up sounding more similar to Despised Icon than it is Napalm Death, Misery Index and Putrid Pile (all of whom the band mention as main influences in the aforementioned last.fm blurb) and it's all the better for the results. Slightly technical melo-death-core that isn't afraid to use a lot of nice pit grooves is what I'd say to people were they ever to inquire about Inveigh, and I'll go out on a limb and recommend this. You haven't heard anything like the vibe these guys have. I'm actually kind of disappointed these guys didn't record more material- it looks like they may actually have gone somewhere interesting with this sound.

Disgust's side

Beginning their side of the split with an obnoxious porn sample that makes me have to turn down the volume every time there's people in the house when I play this side of the split, Disgust are a much more straightforward brutal death metal band from Cambridge. For whatever reason, brutal death metal is fairly prominent with bands here in southwestern Ontario- a lot of mashups of death metal, brutal death, grindcore, deathcore and slam signed to labels like CDN Records, some of them are decent enough, but a lot of them just tend to be extremely bland and cliched, albeit with decent musicianship- Disgust barely even accomplishes the latter to the most minimal extent. This exemplifies the problem I have with a lot of amateurish brutal death metal bands: The riffs all run together except for the painfully boring and static "slams". They lose any sort of abilities to stand out in their attempts at heaviness. The vocal patterns just follow the drum patterns and tend to be very cliched in both rhythmic and delivery qualities. The samples are unfunny and irritating and seem like an extremely unnecessary inclusion- after the turn of the century did all death metal bands just lose every notion in their heads on how to put a sample in an album and not have it sound absolutely fucking stupid? (XXX Maniak excluded, of course.) There is, of course, a substantial hardcore influence on this album too, enough so that the music approaches deathcore at times, which doesn't really work to the benefit nor the disadvantage of the album. It bears such similarity to brutal death metal as a genre that it's irrelevant to even distinguish the difference a lot of the time. This is just a slurry of painfully amateurish riffs dotted with dumb samples- "The Split Dick" has some genuinely good parts, but otherwise they're very few and far between. Tolerable, I suppose, but there's a reason that Disgust has been around this long, released two full-lengths and still gained zero attention, I guess. They just don't really stand out in any good ways.

Overall

While Inveigh's side heavily overshadows Disgust's side here, I did enjoy at least a bit of both sides- Inveigh's side would probably score at a low 80, Disgust's a low 40. I feel no need to take the mean of both scores and be objective, though, so I'll toss on an extra five points minus one point for the retarded album cover with the guy holding his dick (masturbating or clutching in pain?) blood exploding out his dick (not out the tip though?) and the scary-looking people laughing at him in the background. It's all cartoony and it just kind of makes me sad.