Reconstruction by Force

Oh boy, another extreme metal band no one cares about from the midwest on Rotting Corpse Records! I guess I shouldn't complain about that as I enjoy records by Ominous and Ezurate, but the description still doesn't inspire tremendous confidence. Fortunately I'm somewhat safe in my bigotry this time as 'Reconstruction By Force' is pretty mediocre. It's actually curiously mediocre in that it has some moments of pure brilliance dropped immediately next to some of the most retarded songwriting decisions I've ever heard. I mean, it balances out to be average, but it's a rare case that something like this happens.

Ebonmortis is... seemingly everything, I guess. Oldschool death metal versus melodeath intersecting with hardcore crashing against waves of black metal and buzzed overhead by Pantera-style groove- this has essentially everything in it. Hell, there's even a crust punk section here and there. This isn't as bizarre as it might sound; a lot of underground midwestern bands play super-polyglot styles like this. Rarely, though, are the different genres chainsawed together so clumsily and obviously. A hardcore passages opens, and then turns into a tech death section. When I say this, it's not as though there is a core style that shifts from one direction to another- Ebonmortis are playing passages that are from completely different songs, completely different BANDS and putting them together. It's one of the most chaotic and uneven listening experiences ever- the lack of logical structuring is staggering.

I suppose this does challenge the ingenuity of the songwriters though, and at least they put up a good fight. The style plus the band's penchant for longer tracks really puts the instrumentalists through their paces, and they're somewhat successful. There's a fair number of solid death/black riffs on this release, but they're handicapped by leading into other riffs which typically have nothing to do with the first one or simply don't go anywhere at all. The pacing of this record is really off; there's attempts at climactic and dramatic moments but they're typically shrugged off by the band's inability to build tension through song structures. There's patches of brilliance; the opening passage on 'Cadence Of The Damned' is an unbelievably simple little post-rock sounding tremolo riff that could lead into something phenomenal- from a band that really knew what they were doing, anyway. All the great individual parts in the world can't make up for the fact that the band's songs seem constructed at random.

This might be of some curiosity to underground metalheads, but ultimately none of the songs stand out as memorable apart from individual riffs and in general the album comes off as a chore. There's enough good material here to make for a solid EP, but it's spread out so thinly the album it ends up being a part of is nearly a complete loss.