The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell

Ressurecturis' second album is a highly experimental, prog-tinged death metal release, the defining element of which is that it sucks really bad. Though this was released in 2004, the sense I get from this record is very much the same as death metal's experimental growing pains in the mid-'90s. There's a whole host of bad decisions that sound right off a late Mercyless albums: misplaced and awkward clean vocals, sudden injections of groovy post-thrash riffing, meaningless, senseless song structures, and oh so many more. This album should be part of the curricula for music students. It's like a game, you see: just point out each obvious misstep as it pops up in the music.

Let's start with the most immediately ear-grating element: the production. There doesn't seem to be a hint of bass anywhere on this release, leaving the bulk of the sound to come through an upper midrange that's just high-pitched enough to set your teeth on edge. The drums sound particularly thin and lifeless, with a snare drum that sounds like a sample from an early '90s drum machine. That annoying mid-'90s guitar tone where the gain is about fifty percent too low for its own good makes an appearance also, and when ground up against the again overly trebly bass guitar makes for a perpetually annoying string section.

Of course, the style of production on display is particularly highlighted by the style of music played. Riffs alternate randomly from pretty conventional Euro-death riffing to weirdly harmonized passages, chunky groove riffs, and fairly random technical spazzery that sounds like a bad death metal band experimenting with the mathcore sound (which by 2004 was already pretty dated). There's lots of awkward rhythms, plucky bass passages, and boring, aimless riffs to go around. The vocal presence is similarly uneven, lazing around somewhere between a hardcore shout and a legitimate death metal growl most of the time, and occasionally making a diversion into some very inadvisable cleans from time to time.

I don't necessarily think that the elements which make up this album can't coexist in a pleasing fashion; just that it's very hard to make an album like this work and Resurrecturis are not nearly good enough songwriters to make it happen. Oddly enough, I can actually hear the skeletons of decent if unremarkable pseudo-tech death songs underneath all the extraneous elements, but Resurrecturis insists on piling so many gimmicks onto every track that the basis of the songs becomes about as unlistenable as possible. Have you ever wanted to hear a mixture between mid-era Prong and bad tech death? Neither did I.

Needless to say, this is very bad and doesn't need to be heard by anyone.