Make Gore Not War

As I've claimed in some of my previous reviews, sometimes, I find it kind of hard to be as objective as possible when reviewing bands from the same country as mine. This is mostly because Malta, is a very small country, with a small population, and with an even smaller metal scene. Just like what happens in most other countries where the metal scene is small, you tend to have a cluster of musicians who form part of various bands, sometimes spanning multiple sub-genres. To illustrate this image, I'm going to provide some facts. For example, the guitarist behind this band, apart from this project, also forms part of Repugnance and was also a guitarist for Carnivorous Horde. Even earlier than that, I and he used to be in the same band, but due to musical differences, we called it quits very soon.

There's this phenomenon in Malta, where every single metalhead either listens solely to death metal or doom metal. Due to this, Malta is disproportionately represented by death metal bands and doom bands. This might not be an issue, if most death metal bands being created, actually wrote interesting material. Unfortunately, this single, is in my opinion, the epitome of apathy when it comes to writing interesting death/grind music. The only song on this release spans around a minute and a half, and to be honest, there are such few ideas to work with here, that even forty seconds could have been enough to put the point across.

The song is not really bad per se, it's just too claustrophobic and extremely derivative. The crunchy tune the guitarist applies gives the song a very interesting dimension, and it fits into the overall production quite perfectly. However, it's not the case for the rest of the instruments. The bassist from the infamous British party-grind outfit "Party Cannon" plays bass for this band. This band, in my eyes, is more of a parody rather than a serious band, and the same lack of seriousness displayed by the bassist in his work for Party Cannon is also represented with Gastroschisis. The bass sounds horrible in my opinion, and the stuff he played could have been played much tighter. The tone is aggravating to listen to, and when you mash it with the drums in the background, the perfect recipe for chaos is created. However, this isn't the controlled, layered chaos which a lot of bands have perfected throughout the years, but simply annoying, and boring, non-sensical chaos.

The drummer clearly knows what he is doing but again, the lack of tightness in the playing is very annoying and deviates your attention to other unrelated shit. There is an interesting mix of groovy beats, blast beats, and standard drum-fills. However, I don't like how most of the drum-parts sound. The toms sound extremely hollow and do not really resonate with the other instruments. The growls on this song are standard. However, that's the only good thing I can mention about them. Their delivery seems very amateurish, terribly-paced and does not fit well into the overall structure of the song.

There is a break around the mid-point of the song which transforms a decent grind song into a mish-mash of shitty individualism from all the members of the band. It seemed as if the second part of the song was just a race between each of the musician to out-do the other. In my opinion, that's not good musicianship. However, it is important to keep in mind that this band is still in its infancy and each member still has a lot of room to improve, and I'm pretty sure that future endeavors by this band will certainly up the ante, I guess that some death-grind maniacs will drool over this, because it truly is a furious foray into the landscape of grind. Unfortunately, for me, it just doesn't quite cut it.