Register Forgot login?

© 2002-2024
Encyclopaedia Metallum

Privacy Policy

Gathering Darkness > Beholders of the Pain Planet > Reviews
Gathering Darkness - Beholders of the Pain Planet

i'm an adult guys seriously - 54%

Noktorn, June 25th, 2010

From doom/death to brutal death? Not the sort of shift you see very often, but ultimately it doesn't make a big difference, as there's clearly no traces of the band's past on their debut album. 'Beholders Of The Pain Planet' is a US-style brutal death album, the sort of thing that would have been released on United Guttural had it been a half decade faster to the punch and from the midwest. It's not extremely interesting save for how it sounds, well, a half-decade past its prime, as though this album was frozen for a few years and then thawed out for an unreceptive audience. Well, at least it has that going for it.

What we have here: mild technicality in the form of quick palm mutes and some odd chord structures, a Fleshgrind-style vocal performance bumped up an octave, and clipped, stop-start drumming as is appropriate for this style. This is highly rhythmic music; pretty much all the work on this album has been set on creating sets of oddly timed rhythms to interact with each other while the riffs fall by the wayside, echoed in the production which favors the drums over the rest of the ensemble. I've mentioned Fleshgrind in this review, and that's probably the closest approximation of this band's style: mechanical, cold brutal death, but without Fleshgrind's penchant for truly twisted riffs and a demented, murderous aesthetic. It's capably played but the riffs aren't anything more than elementary-school evil and the delivery isn't brutal enough to strike the listener on that alone.

Oh well, this is a forgotten little Spanish album from a group that will probably never attain any notoriety. This has some novelty if you put it on and pretend you're in Ohio in 2001 but apart from that it's entirely skippable.