Impact

Tech Death and black metal are 2 genres of extreme metal that have witnessed a considerable drop in terms of overall quality in the past few years. In black metal’s case it is the outbreak of the bedroom BM idea spearheaded by the popularity of MySpace. On the other hand, technical death metal has seen the rise of a lot of bands that seem to know of nothing in terms of musicianship other than technicality. While being technically adept is a huge plus point for a musician, excess of anything can be painful; in this case being overenthusiastic with your instruments. But time and again one does come across bands that seem to know how tech death is to be done. Pitbulls in the Nursery, to some extent, are one of such bands.

Now, I discovered this band totally by chance on one of my usual senseless bouts of net surfing. Their demo was available for free download from the band’s site. Needless to say, I downloaded it out of sheer boredom. End result: boredom cured! There is some impressive Atheist worship going on here. Like Atheist the band is mostly a tech death band with little prog, most of which is in the form of jazz influences. Although the jazz influence is a bit lower in case of Pitbulls in the Nursery.

The band members know what they are supposed to do and all have mastery over their respective instruments. The guitar work is decent but both the guitarists succumb to the lure of ‘showing off’ at times resulting in what we call ‘wankery’. Most glaring cases of the same are present on the tracks Strong and Impact. The third track though is relatively free of glitches. The drum work is the strongest point for the band. Jerry adds an exotic jazz edge to the drums that isn’t very common in death metal. The bass lines are all decent but don’t actually grab your attention.

Finally, we come to the vocals. Panda (what a weird name!) has a unique vocal style. His growls though quite low aren’t what you’ll call animalistic or brutal. On Impact and Strong, he doesn’t use his full abilities, resulting in a rather generic output. The reason for my praise for him is the third track, Monkey’s Masturbation. There is some clever experimentation here and he is positively funny during the chorus. Ever wondered how a monkey’s death growls will sound. Just listen to the opening track of the demo and you’ll know.

It can safely be said that the band has immense potential, although it has not been channeled properly on this demo. Both the guitarists need to restrain themselves a bit. A riff that has high creative merit is always more pleasing to the ear than one which is more difficult to play on the guitar. Panda needs to use his abilities to a larger extent, so that tracks don’t sound vocally similar (as was the case here with Impact and Strong). I haven’t heard the full length as yet so I can’t judge the level of improvement on it. But I’ll suggest that you download this demo before going for the above mentioned album.