Exiled in Pain

In spite of their German origin, these guys seem to have a great affection for Sweden-you can easily notice this through the sheer number of Swedish bands stuck in the Myspace friends list of Mandatory. In addition to adding Swedish bands as friends on Myspace, they even made their music in a Swedish manner, so that if you listen to their music without noting the band information, you are apt to misunderstand them as Swedish. Regardless, it would be superb if their music resembled the great Swedish death metal bands such as Excruciate and Gorement, but sadly it is Entombed and God Macabre their music resembles.

Numerous are the tracks, and the diversity in their quality and styles matches the abundance of tracks. We can divide the tracks largely into two groups: a few melodic songs, and the rhythm-emphasized songs which form the rest (excluding cover songs). The rhythmic songs can be divided into two groups again: the average (some of which are mediocre) and pure crap. The production (though it varies somewhat from song to song) generally emphasizes the bass tone. The guitar tone, which gets obscurely distorted in down-picked passages, makes one feel like the band really tried hard to sound like Entombed and Dismember, and it really does.

There are only two melodic songs-...Where They Bleed, Obscure Mortification- and these are much better than the others though melodies aren’t new or unique, and there is nothing objectively astonishing. Even these are somewhat melodeath-like. For example, the guitar solo and coherent thrashy-rhythmed riff and vocal developing on 1:52 of ...Where They Bleed are melodeathy, and the chugging groovy down-picking riff in the intro melody of Obscure Mortification reminds one Dark Tranquillity (Swedish!). The songs from 2005 demo are comparatively passable among the rhythm-emphasized songs. Songs like these have the most average-Swedeath-like production and riff, which have enormous scale and blurry rhythmic down-picked melody. Distinguishing themselves from the others, these songs have fine guitar solos that slightly resemble those of Order From Chaos.

Among the utterly simplistic songs, something along the lines of Crypta Crawler is passable, but the songs from the Divine Destruction demo are in a league of their own. Among these, songs like Exelution are in a particularly serious condition, sounding like playing Judas Priest with down-tuning and more distortion (by “Judas Priest“ here I mean Breaking the Law, not The Sentinel). On Sweet Revenge, whose name is also absurd for death metal, the part where vomitting guttural vocals bark with a flippant stupid riff surpasses absurdity and reaches the heights of the comical. When all instruments stop a moment at 0:31, we feel like we should say ‘Uh!’.

Imitating the old school death metal by 21c band is a quite advisable situation in itself, but Mandatory imitates the most crappy parts of the old school death metal. If one is to imitate old school Swedeath, doing it in an improved way like Horrendous – The Chills is the way that actually contributes to the cultural quality of mankind.