Inferis

Hoohh boy, another one of these bands; overproduced brutal deathcore. Since bands like Slaughter to Prevail and Signs of the Swarm have proven that creating generic music with minimal effort while generating at least some sort of moderate hype over it is possible - band after band tries to jump on the bandwagon; just apply an obnoxious masturbatory vocalist over whatever the otherwise faceless and redundant instrumentalist members are doing. Then apply the word "slam" somewhere in your genre for marketing purposes (it doesn't matter if you actually play slam riffs in the music, the stupid kids who eat this shit up will be too distracted by the BR00TAL vocalist to even notice or care).

Mental Cruelty is another unit among these cookie-cutter groups who do absolutely nothing for the genre. Whereas Signs of the Swarm at least created something that was somewhat, at the very least, memorable this year with their album Vital Deprecation, Mental Cruelty rushed out yet another turd not long after dropping an 8-track LP the very previous year. In the early days when this group was coming out with their 2016 EP, they ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶e̶d̶... err my bad I mean, marketed themselves with the faux genre "slamming downtempo" despite featuring few slams and also not at all sounding like downtempo. Difference is, that EP at least has a early passionate charm, whereas Inferis strays further away from any form of redeeming quality and instead feels like another trend-of-the-week product that Unique Leader (a former brutal death, but now deathcore label) has shat out for the quick buck.

Virtually everything that annoys me about contemporary deathcore is featured on this disc. I mean it. Everything. Everything down to the overproduced robotic-sounding production that feels as if no human input was incorporated into a single guitar or drum note. Everything about the vocals, everything about the drum programming too and my most loathed: horrid diarrhea djent guitar tones (why is this still a thing in 2019??). Everything is irritating!!! Plus you know those awful over-hyped vocalists that you've already seen make guest appearances on every other deathcore album you've listened to in the last 5 years? Yep, they're here too! What a surprise, how original. Wasn't expecting that at all.

A lot more would be forgiven in the factor of the garbage robo-production if the music wasn't all that boring. These guys can't write a decent breakdown or even a memorable riff leaving, as I stated earlier, all reliance of notoriety on the vocalist which embodies all current trends like the "tunnel throat" growls or "zombie" screams (the names of these vocal techniques are named as stupidly as they actually sound which is fitting). Some of the only redeeming factors to speak of on this opus is the fact that thankfully there are slam riffs here that appear reminiscent of The Anomalies of Artificial Origin-style flair, and when these slams are performed they sound good, and are almost always guaranteed to commence headbobbing.

Another factor I noticed that is here that was consequently absent from Mental Cruelty's previous albums was the inclusion of symphonic elements. I feel like the symphonic keyboards/synthesizers are starting to become cheesy and overdone, these pieces were fun and interesting 10 years ago when Winds of Plague and Fleshgod Apocalypse brought them into public eye, but now it's just getting old. Hopefully this album isn't going to dig deathcore a deeper grave where all bands are gonna start relying on it again.

I can give these guys some credit for crafting some slow breakdowns, but there's a difference between breakdowns being good and memorable and just writing overly long, drawn-out-to-the-point-of-self-parody breakdowns that places emphasis on the space between the notes, which is the only breakdowns that this album has going for it. Deathcore is to breakdowns as power metal is to pretty melodic harmonizing leads; it's expected in the genre and you want to hear it done awesome and done right when you listen to a deathcore album. However, a deathcore album that doesn't have decent breakdowns is like 1/3 of its enjoyment thrown right out the window. Listen to a Beneath the Massacre or Impending Doom album, then listen to Inferis, you'll see what a mean. Yes there are long drawn-out breakdowns here, but who cares. I'm especially sick of bands like this which play these corny melodic leads during the breakdowns as a way to make them more interesting and/or add some sort of depth during those parts, but it does the opposite. It's old now. It was old right after Oceano put out their Depths album. Nobody wants to hear it anymore.

Basically this is just another generic overproduced deathcore album, listen to Signs of the Swarm's latest album or Infant Annihilator's latest instead of this. Some might argue that those aren't outstanding albums either, but they're both better than this.