The Age of Clitoral Decay

When I first heard The Age of Clitoral Decay, I hated it, but I felt I was being unfair to these guys in my first go-around. I decided to listen to this again and give it another chance. I still don't like it, but it does have some nice bits that I missed the first time around. Still, this is probably the kind of music best reserved for violent scat pornos and drunken mosh pits at dive bars at 2 in the morning. If you're familiar with Dying Fetus, chances are you've probably heard this music before, and done better. This is brutal death metal with occasional transits into slam territory. There's some savage riffing that would be better off with a better sound overall, because while the guitars are nice from time to time, everything else is done haphazardly. And any album with one element doing fine, while everything else is half-assed can really bring things down. While there are some salvageable pieces on here, The Age of Clitoral Decay feels more than a bit cheap.

Much of the music on here is low in variation, but heavy on speedy guitars and brutal riffs. There are times when I was tempted to headbang along to this, as they can create quite a gory flurry. However, the production messes this up since the guitars have much less punch than they could and instead end up sounding very stale and flat, in spite of how well the music is actually written. The sparse slam bits have no weight thanks to this production, and as a result end up detracting from this rather than adding to it. The biggest problem are the drums as they're loud, plastic, sound fake as hell, and overwhelm the rest of the music. They sound so cheap and annoying. The vocals also leave a lot to be desired, as the growls have no personality and the higher shrieks are just grating and hoarse, sounding amateurish. The porno movie samples at the beginning of every song might be good for a laugh, but most of the time it's just unnecessary and makes this album feel very cheap and hokey. Most of the songs have a decent riff or two, but can get really wrapped up in trying to be brutal, and end up degrading into incoherence. I'm not impressed with this.

So in conclusion, we have an album with some good ideas and plenty of brutality, but a stiff, cheap sound, bad production, weak vocals, and annoying plastic drums. This also lacks in songwriting and doesn't work with how little weight is behind the music here. The fact that this has such little identity and resembles so many other boring death metal bands leaves me with little to say. I guess I can say that Lividity would get better on their later albums, but The Age of Clitoral Decay still doesn't cut it.