Extreme Feelings

Just want to get this out of the way first: The opening song has a riff that sounds very similar to the riff ending the Burzum song “Erblicket Die Töchter Des Firmaments” – when you hear it, you will know.

Otherwise, the music is standard thrash / death with a cryptic old school atmosphere. Now this album was released in 1994, so it was coming off the old-school death metal ride, except from Uruguay, making this the first metal band I’ve heard from the country. Not only that, but the band is still active? After releasing just this one full-length sixteen years ago? Sheesh, talk about endurance, especially with all the band member rotations.

Production is honest with all the instruments, and that old school vibe legitimizes Eclampsy’s music. Dry, corroded, rough, and unclean are all the things I feel when I listen to this, but there are other reasons for that, too. The best is with guitar tone – straight from the grave with this distortion, people! It shreds and curses with every pick the guitarists make, and with the addition of bass they create crushing moments. “Shouts Behind The Wall” and the first track are great examples, and some synth backup wouldn’t hurt to add some vintage atmosphere, would it?

The vocals get old after a while though, like a monster barking without doing anything. They may sound threatening at first, but they’re unstable thrash growls like a deeper Max Cavalera around Schizophrenia or Corpsegrinder from Cannibal Corpse. The fast tempos venture into crossover territory and can be pretty jovial, but the production doesn’t call for it at all. The drumming is a rotten bag, with hollow snares killing my enjoyment and easy going patterns with lots of double bass being a bad way to unite things. The songwriting itself for less than thirty minutes is above average (passages, riffs, scratchy solos, and experimentation [the keyboard outro]), though boredom may ensue before you can really get into anything.

So overall I’m not very impressed, but I’m not too disappointed, either. I went in without any expectations and found some halfway decent, if not somewhat mediocre, thrash / death metal. Nothing new or groundbreaking, yet nothing unoriginal that manages to kickass like a lot of death metal. You can be unoriginal and make it work, but these guys weren’t able to pull it off. How the band has managed to stay alive this long on only one run of the mill album is beyond me.