Malignant Future

At this point, even the band entitles themselves as a technical death metal band rather than a brutal death metal band which isn't all that surprising considering throughout their almost 25 years long career they constantly evolved their sound towards the more technical side of the spectrum. Is it a bad thing? Kinda.

The reason I fell in love with the sound of Malignancy was their brutal chugging riffs and the incredibly low guttural vocals. Yet on this 10 minutes long EP, they wandered really far away from their original sound. The vocals are so clean at this point that you can actually understand literally everything Danny Nelson says. The fact that you can understand it isn't the problem, but this also means that the vocals are in the boring technical death metal style instead of the usual eargasmic growls. Roger left the band (again) by the time this was released and even though I am not a huge fan of his projects, he definitely did a much better job with the bass than the new guy does. It's not loud enough and it barely adds anything to the overall sound. The riffs are also mostly written in the style of Eugenics, but with even less heaviness and a lot more technical licks and such, but we all know a band has to evolve so I am not going to complain anymore about this.

As I mentioned, this EP is 10 minutes long so I was expecting a 5 2-minutes long song, but guess what? They only put 3 songs on this, but luckily they managed to hit the short-but-sweet spot with them. Considering the length and the number of songs, the variety here is actually pleasing. We got our shortest song Antiquated Vernacular which starts of somewhat promising with its interesting riff, but ultimately becomes the worst track on the EP thanks to the wankery around the half of the song. The second song, on the other hand, is probably the best track on the album. It has the much-needed chugging riffs (I am getting sick of using this term, but this is the best way to describe them) and it also doesn't vomit technical bits to unnecessary places. It nails the sweet spot and manages to sound like a song that could have been on Eugenics and it wouldn't be out of place. The third song has an unnecessarily long intro sample which really bugs me, but the actual song itself is enjoyable with it's energetic, almost barking growls even though the riff itself isn't the greatest one you will hear from the band.

Overall this is probably the weakest Malignancy release out there, but that doesn't mean that it's bad. The shit didn't hit the fan this time either, so it's worth a couple of listens (especially considering how short the EP is). As long as the band doesn't transform into a Beyond Creation tier 99% technical 1% death metal band, every release from them is welcome.

The highlight of the album is Debilitating Morphology.