Given to the Ground

This is the worst demo I've ever heard in my entire life (maybe a gross over-exaggeration - I've heard Waking the Cadaver's). I don't know what this band is in the preliminary stages of or what they were trying to achieve with this release that sounds like a compilation of 4 different late 90s Nuclear Blast commercial black metal bands showcasing their most hopelessly terrible material. The fact that the band's current incarnation disowns this release perhaps says it all. It all comes across like a high school project that would be done as a "soon to be retired hobby" was given the light of day to infest some ear drums with the most absurdly banal sonic diarrhea ever pressed to plastic.

For starters, all the lyrics are whiny emo crap that sounds like something Poison the Well would have made up if tasked with rewording the lyrics to every "obligatory end of album" sad Hypocrisy ballad at that time. The production values (or lack there of) feels like a couple microphones were thrown in the middle of the room and picked up whatever hiss flew by. You may be thinking "oh, but it's black metal, it's supposed to be lo-fi and gritty", but the extremely mechanical sounding triggered drums, bowel movements reproducing down tuning, and "low-high" double track gimmick vocals (similar to Deicide but with metalcore informed low shout-grunts instead of actual growls) suggests this band was hastily throwing whatever mainstream ideas they could regurgitate at that time into a really weak studio setup on a lazy afternoon. Musically, this has the aesthetics of a late 90s commercial black metal band sans the keyboards. You have trebly melodies played underneath surging power chord driven riffs, chromatic "EXTREME" patterns, mechanical groove rhythms, dissonant meandering, and clean guitar arpeggios serving as "mood" or "intro" material. The problem is, on there own, these elements suggest something more along the lines of Dimmu Borgir's offensive dressed up stadium rock, but at least that band knows how to structure music to relay a "feeling" or "idea", no matter how insipid or trivial. Inferion, on the other hand, just throw random riffs together into a pastiche of parts that never gel together and reeks of a late night "just throw it all together" pro-tools session to meet a deadline. Only there is no deadline since this is a demo that shouldn't have been released by a clueless band that had no idea what it wanted to do, but decided to hop onto the Dimmu Borgir bandwagon "just because" while attempting to salvage itself from "being mainstream" in the eyes of the "true" by including ill-fitting blasting parts and "crazy" vocals. This is neutered late 90s "black metal" without any of the aptitude to make things sound "catchy" or "expressive".

The worst offense on this demo is track 3, a musical non sequitur which sounds like a Drowning Pool song with Phil Anselmo vocals and double bass drumming underneath. This song, when juxtaposed against the other tracks, paints a picture of a band of high school kids that couldn't decide if they wanted to be Century Media/Nuclear Blast pop-black media darlings or 2-note Roadrunner Records step-dad rock. Somehow, this makes even bands like Ancient and Cradle of Filth seem "legitimate" as those bands at least have an idea on how to dress up pop music as something else to fool the masses. If this band was serious about their music, then what were they thinking with this? Throwing on some make-up and "rocking out" to be "cool"? The music these clueless lemmings have made is dangerous to life and culture. While the band managed to become more cohesive and less embarrassing over time (sounding like a crappy swede-core wannabe), their output has always been this unnecessary and dishonest (even going as far as to lie and claim a "Peter Beste" photo credit across their new promo photos for "street cred"). With Metallica's Reload being only $2 on Amazon, it's hard to imagine why anyone would waste $5 on this glorified drink coaster. I sincerely hope Inferion reads this review and realizes that good music is made from writing music you want to hear; not dressing up like morons to fit an image and pander to a scene's audience by covering hasty thread bare "metal" riffs in late 90s commercial black metal aesthetics. At the very least, another Florida band has released something that's about as embarrassing as a Wykked Wytch release. Vapid.