Serial Urbicide

Just want to say, that I am blown away by this effort. Everything on this is truly badass and groundbreaking. I am shocked this group doesn't have more recognition and I will simply place this reasoning on the fact that this release is still relatively new. Everything about this record is sickening and holds no dull moment for a slam band.
Hailing from the country of Belarus, this brutal death metal outfit came onto the scene with their 2010 debut full-length Butcher Basement which was kind of, shall we say... understandably overlooked. The production, variety and delivery were missing. The young slammers knew their music must have missed something to be truly badass and innovative. Years later, it was found while writing for their sophomore follow-up release, Serial Urbicide.

Why is this album so great? Well, I'll just come out and say it; it motherfucking rocks my socks. Plain and simple. This band does pretty much everything right that I would expect from what makes slam so awesome. As a fan of slam death metal, the bands in it can be pretty repetitive and boring after so many doing the same thing. Even I can say this. But Extermination Dismemberment offer something very high in quality. The production, the bass drops and the slams are the three major elements that catch my ears the most here. Let's start with production: the production here is superb because it catches you off guard and places you in this world of desolation bombarded with badassery. THIS album right here is what Disfiguring the Goddess would sound like if Disfiguring the Goddess was an actual slam project. DtG is a criminal in the world of slam death metal simply because it isn't slam but markets itself as slam. Big Chocolate should get more shit for the fact that he actually markets Emmure/Asking Alexandria-esque chugging breakdowns as "slam" instead of playing slams. What we hear on Serial Urbicide is production done basically in the same fashion of Disfiguring the Goddess, all those crunchy, high-produced and quality bassy breeze licks you hear in Big C's lonesome one man project is here, placed in a legit slam band. It's beautiful to me albeit that I actually love the production done in Disfiguring the Goddess, but not the music itself (sorry I hate fretless chug-chug bands).

Secondly, let's look into the bass drops. Bass drops are an exciting key element here. In basic music theory, what I've taken into notice lately is that one really enjoys his music when there's something to look forward to in it. A "specific part", so to speak. It's like the same way we have thrash metal fans waiting for that guitar solo or those metalcore kids waiting for that big breakdown. In this album, there's two of those "awaiting" factors. Slams are one thing (even though there's lots of them) but the other thing is MAJOR bass drops. The bass drops on this album rattle your speakers like an atomic bomb and I literally worry for my vehicle's stereo speakers everytime this album lands one on me out of fear it will do any damage to my sound system, which it probably can. Wanna hear an example? Skip ahead to the 3:02 time mark of the title track from this album and hear for yourself. It doesn't just stop there, the band really insists on its bass drops so much that it capsulizes them in other tracks while punishing riffs invite the listener to this world of nonstop audial destruction as heard in "Survival" and "Devastation Squad".

Finally, the slams here are just as amazing as the guitarist's enchanting licks while they perpetuate between semi-technical laden grooves, fast tremolo strumming and then right back to the slam. Arseniy Kovalchuk is an amazing strings player not for how fast he can play or how much technique he uses, but really because he does something that hasn't been done in the same genre so many previous times beforehand. Out of the play throughs that I've given this disc already, I can formally proclaim his playing tickles my fancy as a contemporary death metal guitarist should. The production work layered to his guitar playing also kind of impresses me as well as everything else on this album. I mean as high-in-tone as the bass is on this album, I'm surprised his guitar comes in as clear as it does. Trust me, this record has A LOT of bass. There's a few parts where the bass stops playing and you can completely hear and notice that a bass has stopped considering how much depths is lacking from everything else behind the lead instruments when these small bass break parts come up.

Before I move onto speaking about vocals, I'll talk about drums. The drums aren't exactly groundbreaking, but get the job done. Solid-toned triggered double bass elegantly moves the music on and on to the next groove or slam, where it is only then all about the floor tom coupled with the snare. Unfortunately enough, however; the snare is pretty low in the mix compared to every other drum. The bass drum is very high in the mix (along with every other bass element on this album as I explained before), leaving the snare to just a fiddle in the back of things. What's worse is that the hi-hat and ride/China cymbals are even lower in audibility, leaving them almost non-existent unless you keep a very keen ear out for them. But yes, onto vocals, they're what you expect straight from the slam league: deep, monstrous, guttural growls... but more! Believe it or not, Valeriy Kozhemyako actually adds variety (maybe his name should be changed to Variety Kozhemyako, haha... I had to). His growls actually aren't the same guttural by guttural as one would expect by a band from this genre. On this album, he periodically trades in his guttural for a juicier one, or a less brooding growl. He even changes the tone of his voice altogether on this album for some songs. "Bloodbath Religion" is a good example of this where he's heard singing in a death growl maintaining to that of more understandability and putting gutturals on the momentary backburner where they're only placed in the backing vocal spots on this song.

I love this album. Practically said, it's the fucking shit. Everything from bumping, bass-heavy production standards, to innovative openings featuring soundclips of tortured women screaming, to the sounds of automatic firearms are here. Even the album's final track "Human Holocaust" has colorful synthesizers playing behind the guitar halfway through its run which are reminiscent to southern California spazzy deathcore outfit Arsonists Get All the Girls' early works. Extermination Dismemberment obviously aren't afraid to experiment, but what their experimenting did was bring me probably the greatest slam album I've heard that was released within this past decade and it's all thanks to a band that built up the courage to actually not do the same thing every band does that wants to sound like Devourment. This album is badass. it slams, it rocks, it's just amazing. Won't call it perfect, but it's way too good for me to just play it off my stereo system just once a week.

Top tracks: "Survival", "Human Holocaust" and definitely the title track.