The Lazarus Breed

God everything on this album takes fucking forever. Is the first track really less than five minutes long? From my perspective it took about six months- let's not even get started on the not one but TWO eight plus minute tracks. This is a constant problem throughout 'The Lazarus Breed'; the band takes forever to get anywhere, and when they arrive, it's usually a hundred times less interesting than anticipated.

Fleshmould is a death metal band- of sorts. Frankly, a lot of the riffs seem more carved from a traditional heavy metal or prog mold than death metal itself, despite all the double bass runs and hearty growls. It's also rather slow music; I honestly can't remember if a blast beat is ever used over the course of the album, and the tempo never really rises above a still rather moderate midpace. This is kind of an interesting novelty, and it has worked for bands in the past- nary a blast to be found on 'Slowly We Rot', right? I think the closest they get is a fast thrash beat on 'Eternal Shifting Portals', which is immediately dropped for more aimless prog noodling.

The riffing style on this album is perplexing, being a seemingly random mixture of tremolo riffs like very early Cannibal Corpse, somewhat melodic, proggy leads, and some Meshuggah-style off-time post-thrash chugging. The combination is rather unsavory, frankly; when the band's not chugging around in various configurations they're usually playing very simple, melodramatically melodic riffs that don't tend to go anywhere. The music is also verse/chorus based, which is fine- for music much catchier than this stuff. Fleshmould's music is frankly so aimless and circular it makes literally everything seem boring. Yeah, I tapped my foot to a couple of the chunkier riffs, but really where are any of these songs going?

'The Lazarus Breed' is a bad album, but I'll give it credit for being bad in a highly unusual way for a death metal release. This is definitely one of the more interesting and odd bad albums I own. That being said, yeah, it still sucks and I'd rather listen to a good album instead. I think I've made it through this CD in one sitting once.