Atrocities

Enragement’s third album, Atrocities, is one that gets the ball rolling, only for it to prematurely stop dead in its tracks. It kicks off with the explosive “Sadistic Sedition” which violently shoves itself down your mouth through its razor-wire covered thrash riffs, maintains that with “Lethal Human Experimentation” mixing it up between a chunky groove and blazing fast tech death riffing, and “Siberian Frost” carries this further with how each of the riffs and the soloing on top of it all play off one another for a right chaotic sound. But then… “Decimating Winds of Phosphorus” comes on, wrecks all that good will with a trite groove and tired tremolos, and turns what could’ve been an exciting Hour of Penance-esque death metal joint into a more ordinary modern death metal album. It’s not through a lack of trying – there are still some cool moments, like a riff that grabs your attention or a showstopper of a solo – but it does seem as if they really put their best foot forward!

The issues this album has is endemic of a lot of death metal for quite some time now. It’s like they’ve got the right idea for a great death metal album, and that’s about it. Hyperspeed violent riffing, with the odd chunky groove and guitar solo to mix things up and provide an ample contrast. It’s not so much that they seldom excel or anything; it’s more a matter of the music becoming more and more inconsequential. Look at “Trade in Viscera”, for instance. It’s got cool elements, like the various growls – the deeper, guttural ones and the mid-range growl/rasp – have this slick trade-off for the chorus, and the solos are exquisitely played with a right melodic bent. But it’s cool window-dressing to a merely solid groove. One that makes this four-minute song feel like it’s longer because this mid-paced riff lacks the spark the rest of the stuff has. It’s a persistent problem where perhaps the riff is good but played out or plain goes nowhere, or the best parts are secondary if not ancillary like guitar solos.

Atrocities starts off as a modern monolith but then falls into a merely solid affectation. It quickly becomes the kind of album that’s certainly made by talented people with many of the right ideas that just don’t come together as well as they’d like to. Do the riffs smoke? Does the drumming sound like the sound of the apocalypse? At times, sure. But beyond that, it goes from consistently invigorating to decent and occasionally vaguely interesting.